I am grateful to be working and to be enjoying the work I am doing. It is a strange space that I’m in at the moment. While there are definite challenges, irritations, seemingly endless meetings, and days when I look up and it’s 5:00 p.m. and I’ve wondered what I’ve accomplished, I actually like my job. And while I can’t say that I jump up every morning and exclaim, “Oh goodie, I get to go to work today!” I nonetheless feel pretty good from one day to the next. Like anyone I have my moments when I feel frustrated, cranky and ill-tempered, baffled, exhausted, and myriad other less than stellar emotional states and at times complain more than I like to admit. But overall I am not simply grateful to be working, which in and of itself is a blessing in these difficult economic days, but to be working with people I like to try to make our institution and the world around us a better place.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my “what’s next” in terms of what I wanted to do with my life. While I was job searching, my focus was more on getting employed and less on what my life purpose was. Working full time can sometimes put a crimp in one’s creativity, particularly when after 9 hours or so in the workplace and a 55 to 95-minute commute, I come home often too mentally exhausted to do anything more creative than to write this blog. Still, I am determined to carve out more creative time here at home. Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways to find creative expression at work, but that too requires carving out time.
I’ve written before in this blog about discovering one’s life work. I figure if one is going to spend 8, 9, 10 hours per day doing something it would be good if they moderately enjoyed what they were doing. Back when I was a kid I wanted to be a writer and artist. Who knows but if my mother had encouraged me in this pursuit I might have been a children’s book author; but alas, fate had other plans for me. My parents were more vocationally or professionally-minded; creative writing and drawing was at best a hobby, but not something one could make a decent living at. So their encouragement directed me and most of my siblings toward academic and career pursuits that appeared to have a clearer path toward gainful employment.
How I ended up doing “diversity” work in higher education is somewhat more mysterious, but God works in strange ways. I sort of “happened into” the work I do and before I knew it I had been doing it for 20 years. Then, about 10 years ago I was standing in my office at the university I was working for at the time and suddenly a voice spoke to me asking, “Will you give me 10 more years?” Now before you go and ask me if it was an actual voice, my response is, “Of course not,” but it was as clear as if I’d heard the words aloud. And I knew I was being asked if I were willing to continue doing the often mentally and emotionally draining work I’d been doing for so long. It had become almost a mission, a calling of sorts. I’m not sure what got into me, but I agreed. Depending on how I do my math and pinpoint what year it was that God actually asked me about it, I’ll either complete my decade of service in October of 2013 or October of 2014. By then I will have worked in this field for 30-plus years. Wow.
I’m grateful to be liking what I’m doing. Heaven knows I’ve spent plenty of time working with people I didn’t respect or in toxic environments or for supervisors who didn’t understand or care about what I was trying to accomplish. And while things are far from perfect, they are good nonetheless. And good is, well, good.
