Today I am reflecting on this little piece of prose I wrote when I was in Atlanta in May for @fteleaders’ Christian Leadership Forum, where I met so many lovely and imaginative people. I am reflecting precisely because I am in a place of feeling physical, mentally, and emotionally burnt out. When I am this way, I feel like my longings increase and my sense of imagining and hoping for a world otherwise are intensified.
At the time I wrote this, I was in a happy place. I share it now to remember…to remember:
Where my hope lies currently…
The things that break my heart may not always get the last word. There is liberation, rest, and renewed imagination on the other side of deep pain.
I may have been misled, but God can reorient my path toward deeply caring community that celebrates my full humanity.
My body may be tired, but my mind is racing with ideas and dreams again.
I can grieve what I have lost (continually) and make space for the emergence of something new. I do not need to have all the words yet to describe what that newness is, but I can lean into its growing pains.
God is good enough to place people in my life who can support my flourishing. God is faithful enough to keep me through the uncertainty, even when that uncertainty lives in me more than in the world I encounter. Even when that uncertainty lives in the world more than it lives in me.
There is an
abundance on the other side of imperialistic models of education that suppress imagination. There is abundance on the other side of capitalistic models of work that oppress the exhausted body.
We can and will dream worlds where we are rested enough to imagine anew.
Survival mode is not our inheritance.