You know, I don't really have a clue where this blog post is going. I thought I knew. I had a plan. But even as I've put the photos above together and looked up the following poem I wrote a number of years ago, I didn't have "it" all. Like I said, I thought I did, but this has been a morning of synchronicities.
It started with watching the videos announcing the classes that Leslie Hershberger will begin teaching online on April 1st.
I watched those videos, and I felt a rush—pure joy. I want to take the 12-week course. I can hardly wait.
I told Mother this morning that I felt 6 again. You get to go to school when you’re 6. I could feel the same energy this morning that I felt way back then—I remembered the full skirt, the starched sash, the freshly curled hair—I can feel that familiar Big Chief tablet in one hand and that fat pencil in the other. And the excitement of that first day of school—real school!
My birthday falls on September 4—3 days past the deadline for public school in those days. And my mother panicked! What to do??? I was o so ready to go to school—and I knew 6 was THE age. ALL 6-year-olds get to go to school! Except those whose birthdays fall after September 1. But my daddy had an idea. He was going to Howard Payne Baptist College in those days, and they had a pre-school and 1st grade for students’ kids. He signed me up.
He’s probably one of the reasons I was so excited! One of my favorite memories is laying in bed at night listening to him and his friends around the kitchen table talking theology, professors, classrooms, and textbooks. O my gosh, I wanted to be like him. I wanted to go to school, and I wanted to preach, too!
I found out later that being a girl limited my capacity to preach like him, and my cultural upbringing and finances limited my ability to go to college. I never took more than a few business courses so I could go to work. But I didn’t get to go to school to learn about GOD! And that’s what my Daddy did.
I didn’t get to do that until I got a chance to go to the Cenacle in Houston. I took a 3-year spiritual direction course. Awesome! I was finally getting to do what I was created to do. Except….
And that’s where this little poem comes in:
“Concentric Circles”
… spoken long ago in yesterday,
between sleeping and waking,
heard again today as if brand new.
Words held out and continually repeated
as Invitation, the call to Mystery.
“Leave your comfort zone,
the safety of this place.
Move to
the next space,
the far distant shore,
the new horizon.”
Each movement
plunging me deeper into Mystery,
yet, always
bringing me Home.
That’s what my spiritual journey has been like—one horizon after another, always invited to move through my fears into the next place.
Kind of like Abraham, fka Abram. Andy preached Abram’s story this morning. Genesis 12:1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
That’s been my story. Twenty years ago, I heard an invitation to “leave your father’s house and go someplace new.” I didn’t know then that I would re-hear the invitation a number of times, but apparently I’m hearing it again today. Too many synchronicities lining up, and this wonderful sense of adventure! And even as I finished this blog piece, it dawned on me that my poem ends with me coming home. And the title of this course is "Coming Home..." O wow!
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