For all I write I'm usually not very personal. This is mostly by design. I mean, I never much cared for pastors who preached all about their own lives, and I'm not much into self-promotion on the blog. There is a danger in not talking about myself--at a certain point I lose my humanity and become a thinking-head, a writing-automaton. It's posts like this that will hopefully keep me from becoming that. This is going to be more personal than most, and for that I do not apologize in the slightest.
This year marked my third mission trip/service trip/cultural immersion/whatever you want to call what we do with our high school youth each summer (personally I prefer service trip, generally, though this year was more of a cultural immersion). And this year was different than every other year--as it tends to be. Some parts were rough; some parts were great. We persevered and had what I would consider a great trip.
But the reason this trip meant more to me than years' past had little to do with what we actually did. It had far more to do with the relationships built over the course of three years, and (maybe more importantly) it had everything to do with the roller coaster ride I've been on professionally since Natalie was born. Things have been fine at home, but my time and energy has been sapped, and we have had a string of rather serious events in the life of our parish since I returned to the job in April. A change of secretary was tough, especially given the circumstances, then a spate of deaths, including a suicide of a man with a young family and a murder involving family of our congregation were tougher. Finally, in the last month we've lost a couple members who lived good long lives, but, frankly, they always made me happy to visit and, selfishly, I was very sad to see them go.
All of this is to say that this year's trip was a needed relief for me. I needed to get away--even if it meant time apart from Kate and Natalie. I missed them--and they missed me--but I returned a better person for it.
With that said, I don't want to minimize how much our youth had to do with my experience. They make my job fulfilling again and again. More than that, they make me happy. And it's my absolute pleasure not just to preach at them and teach to them but also to mentor in whatever way I can. I enjoy doing Confirmation and Bible stuff, but I also enjoy doing high ropes with them, gardening alongside them, and beating them in mini-golf (or losing, whatever). I love that I get to let down my guard and allow them both to disappoint me and thrill me. Far more often they thrill.
I love my job. I really do. But the truth is that most of the time I don't make a whole lot of a difference. I try to inspire but it's hard to see the results (if any). I try to be passionate but I run into the same tired reasons why my passion isn't enough: time, commitments, busy-ness. I'm expected to do the nuts and bolts of my job, and the other stuff--the exciting stuff, the vision stuff--just ends up getting sloughed off. This is why I love weeks like the one I just had, because for a short period of time I get to be fully present with a group of people. They aren't on their way from somewhere to somewhere; they aren't checking their phones every five seconds to see what's going on in another place; they aren't thinking about where they'll be in thirty minutes or what they'll be doing, because they will still be here with us. It's absolutely incredible to be 100% present with inspiring youth for an extended period of time. There's nothing like it.
We did affirmations at the close of the week, which were meaningful as always. I said some things I really meant to some great young men and women and I had some people say some startlingly nice things about me. But even more than that I had the kind of affirmation that makes everything worth while not during our formal group time but during a perfectly innocuous event at the end of the week. We were at a rest stop in Erskine during our drive home when one of our girls who I've had in Confirmation and has now gone on our trips the last two years leaned over and said, "P Frank, I mean this in a completely not-awkward way, but I love you"
What can you say? The only thing that came to mind was "I mean this in a completely not-awkward way, but I love, too."
I could hardly capture a better snippet to illustrate why I do my job. It was so simple, so silly, but it mattered so much. I don't do this work because I want to be affirmed, and honestly formal affirmations lose most of their luster anyway, but there are those golden moments that are from the heart that do matter, that inspire me more than I could ever hope to inspire others. It's no surprise that one of them happened on a week like this.
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