Missional Imagination - Missional Wisdom Foundation’s Launch & Lead 2020
— Final CEP Paper —
Describe, Discover, Discern, and Dream
I spent my time during this class/project at Press & Grind, a coffee shop that is a block up the street from me. I enjoyed the chance to get to sit, observe, think, and ponder possibilities there. When I was thinking about how to sum up and share my experience, one of the things I realized I came back to often was how stuck I felt. I didn’t feel like I had any grand ideas that were worthy of expanding upon. When I would start feeling stuck at the coffee shop, I would pack up my things and go for a walk around my neighborhood, which I do often now during the pandemic.
This week, I went on one of those walks and was listening to music on my Advent playlist on Spotify. I had heard the songs before, but I was able to receive the words in a new way for some reason. Four songs resonated with me in particular with their words/meaning matching up with the four different phases we focused on in our missional challenge journals. I started thinking about the type of hope we journey through and with during this season of Advent - a type of expectant hope, the hope that God has come and is coming; a type of hope that even a pandemic and extensive injustice in our world can’t take away. Then I realized maybe this hope is what has been wrapped up in this experience for me. Did I come away with a five-step plan and certain discernment about where I’m being called now and next in ministry? Sure didn’t. Did I find an openness in myself, an openness to experiencing God again in ways that I haven’t in a while - an openness that has allowed me to dream again? Absolutely.
Here are my reflections, and some raw and a tad out-of-tune accompanying songs, about walking through the describe, discover, discern, and dream phases of this project:
Key Insights:
Like my inability to feel like I had enough insights and good thoughts to share in this final project, one of my biggest insights during this project is that I am quick to feel sparks of joy and passion for different tasks/types of work, but I am also quick to doubt my abilities. I have so many things I like to do or want to learn how to do, many of which come naturally to me. I’ve acted on a lot of these in the past few years. In college, I taught myself how to play piano and took up running for the first time. When I studied abroad, I started writing a lot and blogged about my experiences. When I got to seminary, I decided I wanted to teach myself guitar and hand lettering. After grad school, I got a job doing communications work and started doing social media strategy/web design work with different churches/organizations in the SEJ.
I doubted myself during each of these stages. I never told anybody I was learning piano or guitar. I would write hand lettered gift tags and signs that looked “good enough” with regular pens but never took the time to fully learn calligraphy with proper brushes. I stopped blogging because I didn’t think I had anything worth sharing. I stopped running because I wasn’t able to run as much as my friends. I downplayed my love for graphic design and video work because I hadn’t done it in a professional setting before. I did all of these things and put up walls because I was scared. Scared of failure, of feeling let down if they didn’t work out, of things getting too hard. I think this fear is one of the things that keeps me from dreaming up new ideas as well. If I come up with an idea or feel something bubbling up inside of me, I have to be vulnerable to act on that - and with vulnerability always comes the chance of being let down. As I continue to be aware of this tendency, my prayer is that I would be able to discern when listening to my fears is good and healthy, helping me to set necessary boundaries, and when it is holding me back.
Another key theme both in Leadership 101 and our Storytelling course is how we decide which parts of our stories to tell in different contexts - and what stories we tell ourselves. It can take a while to tell other people parts of our stories. A big reason why this happens is because we first have to claim them ourselves. Singing is a perfect example for me. I joined band in middle school and played all the way through college. I never sang in our church choir because I was busy with other extracurriculars. I was a band kid. When I got to college, our campus ministry had a non-audition choir. All my friends were in it, so I decided to join so I could hang out with them. I thought it would be a fun thing and I spent every night at Wesley anyway, so figured I might as well go where everybody else would be. I sang with the choir all four years of college. My junior year, we had a recording session with some alumni for the 40th anniversary of the choir. I was volunteered for a solo and was scared but ended up feeling empowered by the chance to perform in that way. I thanked our choir director for thinking of me and she said - “Michelle, you were wonderful. See… didn’t I tell you… you are not just an instrumentalist - you are a vocalist, too.” Leigh Anne saw this part of my story far before I was ever able to claim it for myself. It wasn’t until two years later that I was a second year at Candler and our music director there encouraged me to audition that I realized maybe it was time for me to claim this as part of my story. I sang with the Candler Singers for two years and now get to sing with a few different churches from time to time. I have so many more examples of this in my life and I am grateful for the people who see me for who God created me to be, including all of my gifts and talents that I haven’t yet recognized or claimed.
I reflected on this a lot during my time at the coffee shop. When I thought about who was there, what they were doing, what their needs were, if they desired deeper connection in community, I realized that they all have stories too. Each person that sat at the table across the parking lot or held the door for me has parts of their story that they’re excited about and parts of their story that they choose to hide. During this pandemic, I feel like it has increased both our desire to share stories and also our instinct to play it off like everything is okay. Reflecting on stories, of individuals and of communities, has helped me to remember that we are all human and that God works in that humanness. It has also humbled me by reminding me that I don’t have to do everything by myself and that my idea doesn’t have to be something that will get me recognition or be seen - maybe what’s bubbling up will help just a handful of people, and that will be okay too.
Decide, Do, Debrief
I’ve been going on a lot of runs since the break up in September. It helps me stay active and to feel less groggy during my day (and prevents me from staying home and eating all my feelings). It also helps me feel more a part of the world while working mostly from my desk in my bedroom during the work day. But, the problem with me as a runner is I got distracted so easily. I feel a little bit like the dog in “Up” who always gets distracted by squirrels. So my runs end up being more leisurely movement than athletic exercise most days of the week.
I think my life in ministry and my experience with this class is similar to my neighborhood jogs. I feel scattered and like I don’t have one direction that I am solidly moving towards. I don’t feel like I have one goal or any one path that I am trying to go down. When I do have big ideas that excite me, I feel like I’m pretty good at figuring out the steps that I need to achieve my goals and can motivate myself to stay on task so that I can reach my goal. More often than not though, my ideas aren’t fully formed or I have so many ideas that my energy ends up split between them and I don’t complete the goal or I’m not even able to measure what completing the goal would look like. I think this is what happened both in my coffee shop time and with this final project.
I went on a run last week and here’s how it went:
Morning spent watching Christmas movies on the couch
Finally got myself up and put on running clothes
Didn’t feel like running but decided I should at least go out for a bit or it was wasted energy to get changed at all
Walked out the front door and started my music
Jogged to the corner and started thinking about my final project
Decided maybe I would just record videos for the project so ran to a trail near my parent’s house
Recorded 8-10 videos
Started walking again and realized I might not actually want to use the videos
Realized I had barely gotten any steps in so should run at least a mile before I went home
Started jogging but then saw a cool sign and took a picture of it
Started jogging again but then saw a pretty bush I wanted to take a picture of
Walked home, feeling scattered, frustrated, and defeated
But then I started to think what was my goal? If my goal was to run a few miles then I obviously was not successful at completing that task. But if my goal was truly to get outside for 20 or 30 minutes and not just let my brain tired to much by watching get another Christmas movie before Thanksgiving, then I actually can celebrate this because I did indeed reach my goal. And I’ve worked out a ton of my project at the same time so it’s actually added to my goal and exceeded what I had hoped to complete in a 30 minute chunk.
The whole time I’ve been sitting at the coffee shop during this class all I can think is I’m not completing this correctly, I’m not achieving my goals, I am not completing the assignment the right way, I’m really failing at this. So what if I can flip that the same way I flipped my walk today. What was my goal in this project? If my goal was to come out of the project with an ongoing event plan that will save everybody from loneliness in the city of Atlanta and help everybody in the coffee shop know Jesus, then I failed. But, if my goal was to open myself up to a posture of imagination and ponder how God might be working in this space, then I overwhelmingly succeeded.
I get stuck between decide and do often because of these expectations. But awareness is one of the most helpful steps to moving forward. I’m looking forward to continuing this season of self-discovery and community-discovery as we continue through Launch & Lead together.