What Am I Doing Here, Anyway?

For a long time, I had a theology all worked out in my head. The universe is pretty random, went my line of thought, because God made the world wild. We have tigers, and we have bacteria, and we have meteors being flung wildly through space. Sometimes a person gets in the way of one of these entities and bad stuff ensues. I worked this out after a lot of trial and error and suffering as a way to answer that big theological question, and to not hate God. I don’t expect the world to be safe and snug and predictable, because I know it is not. I don’t expect God to intervene to fix the universe my way, because so far, in the times it really would have mattered to me, like when my mother died of cancer at an early age, there was no intervention. And truly, there is so much suffering in the world and so many people who need help, why would I get the help instead of someone else? So that’s the way it went on for a good long time, and I thought it was settled. I still sang hymns in church whose lyrics I had to sort of mentally translate, songs about God’s eye on the sparrow and the whole world in his/her hands.

But then a couple of years ago, something happened that sort of set my theological  homeostasis on its head, and I am still shaking my head like a dog that just climbed out of a swimming hole trying to recover. It started with losing my job in the book publishing industry back in 2010, a loss I sort halfway engineered, seeing that some positions in my company were going to be phased out, I quietly let it be known I had a book I wanted to write and ideas about freelance work, so if somebody had to go, it could be me. And then after that, every step I took, every bright idea I tried to bring to fruition crumbled in my hand like dust. I had business plans and Kickstarter proposals that got almost to the finish line but never…quite…worked.

What was going on?

Well, certainly part of what was going on was a national economic crisis, but even so, I could not seem to get any traction anywhere. I applied for  a job delivering candy to vending machines and could not get an interview. And one night, during a long soul searching session with my best friend, she asked, “Is there something else? Something you have always wanted to do that is calling you?” and without having any idea this was still bottled up in my heart, I said, “Well, you know, I was really born to preach, but it’s too late for that.” And then the room got very still and my friend said, “Why is it too late?”

And I said to myself, well this is nuts, I really can’t possibly go back to school, and yes, there was that divinity school program I entered twenty years ago and abandoned for a number of excellent reasons, and so now it would just never work. But the idea, having been said out loud kept pulsating and expanding, and something in me started to say, well of course. But still, I kept expecting to run into some obstacle that would stop this whole ludicrous enterprise, like the fact I had no job or money, or that I am over fifty, or that I am so introverted I can barely use the telephone.

And yet every time I took a half step toward this idea, all those obstacles that seemed so insurmountable in all those other projects seemed barely to exist in this one. I found a living situation two blocks away from a seminary. The seminary helped me find funding. Friends and colleagues wrote recommendations. It was as if there were some force pushing me forward, as if I were on a river, and the current was gathering speed. “But I don’t believe it works this way,” I shouted at the other boats I was passing, and people waved and smiled at me as I went by, which I took to mean “You don’t really have to know how it works. Just keep going.”

So I am. I don’t know why we suffer and I don’t know why we thrive, and I intend to just be grateful and to report occasionally on my progress. If you want to share theories, or playlist suggestions, or tips on paddling techniques, leave a comment.