Hurry Up and Wait

The interviews have been had, the paperwork and the background checks are mostly done, and now I wait.

I’m a pretty patient person when it comes to letting things take their course. When I’m without a steady income and needing to be earning money—because some companies are not at all understanding when it comes to late payments!—it’s really, really hard to wait for the phone calls that say, “We need you!” It’s not about the money, ultimately, even if that’s the presenting issue; it’s about being a productive member of society using the gifts and skills I have developed over the years to teach and to preach. I trust that everything will be okay, I’d just like God to work a little faster…

Now, the good thing is that when I’m not working, I am actually writing. The manuscript for the book is well and truly underway after the preliminary work to convert internal references to footnotes, which are much easier to track down and expand. I have a truly terrible overview and a worse “book hook” drafted, which is fine because first drafts are supposed to be awful. My hope is to have a proposal ready by Thanksgiving and the full draft completed by Easter. I feel like I need some kind of beaker graphic to post with milestones along the way so I have a visual to share, one that I want to be able to update every two weeks or so. I’ll have to work on that.

In the mean time, it’s nice to have handbells in my hands again and to be part of a choir, even if my hope is that I won’t be there every Sunday. I’ll be able to play and sing at Christmas and I can block Sundays off to be at my “home” church in Attleboro when the bells are playing. I can be available to help friends and to keep people company when they can’t be left alone for long periods of time. I can work on my knitting, too, which I neglected over the last couple of years. And to a greater extent than has been possible at any point in my adult life, I can pace my life the way I need to rather than as others need me to. That’s a very freeing feeling.

My pace of life right now? Hurry up and wait!
UPDATE to the previous post: Comcast claims that I owe them money, but they are waiving the money owed because I was “given incorrect information by our customer service representatives.” I don’t buy that for a moment, in part because I asked for copies of my last two bills to be e-mailed to me (lesson learned, ALWAYS save or print at least one e-bill a quarter!) for my records and I have not received anything since I asked. I’ll tackle that again next week. If the bills show what Comcast claims, then I’m satisfied. If they say what I think they say, I’ll press the issue.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Necessity of Symbolic Acts

June is LGBTQ Pride Month. I’ve had several interactions in the last week with people who don’t understand why this is necessary or who are offended by the proliferation of rainbows around them. I’ve also had a couple of interactions with people who say that the proliferation of rainbows is meaningless and that only action makes a difference. It’s rather sad that in 2017 any of this has to be explained, but it does, so here’s my take as an LGBTQ ally (I hope I've used appropriate language throughout; if I've missed something, please know it's inadvertent and let me know what's better because I want to learn): Pride Month is necessary because people who identify as LGBTQ in any way are still subjected to discrimination, inequality, and outright hatred on a daily basis, often in very public ways:  Marriage equality became the law of the land in 2015 here in the United States and just in the past couple of weeks in Taiwan. That makes right in the neighborhood of 2
Read more

The Infrequent Opportunity I Couldn't Pass Up

I've embarked on this writing leave from settled parish ministry and this was my first week not preaching or leading worship. Last week I preached at my "home" church, Second Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Attleboro, Massachusetts. It was wonderful to be welcomed home and to see friends; it will be wonderful to attend infrequently over the next several months when I have no worship obligations elsewhere, especially when I get to play handbells...the one activity I have missed most since I left 10 years ago. I miss my people in Schellsburg tremendously, but almost without exception in the eight days I've been back, the first thing people I know have said to me (whether Attleboro church folks, colleagues, or friends in the community) is, "WELCOME HOME!" I did  something today I haven’t done very many other times in my life: I attended a church where I had no professional role, knew no one in the congregation, and had no connection to the
Read more

Reflections on the Fallacy of Either/Or Thinking

 Every year, I write a "Blessing for the Sharing of Light" for the Christmas Eve service at the church I'm serving. This year, I wrote two, but the light was shared virtually because both of our services were held via ZOOM.  I've been thinking a lot this year about the ways that we portray dark and light culturally, which prompted the blessing I used for the early family service. We as a people will only get closer to building the Realm of God when we deal honestly with White Supremacy and all that derives from it or inspires it. One sick inspiration for it is the notion that light is always better than dark; it comes through the metaphor of light=good and dark=evil that was an ancient philosophical and religious idea that was twisted by those whose greed and thirst for power needed an ideological underpinning.  God’s first words were, “Let there be light!” And there was light.   God separated the light from the darkness, making day and night. We are born with a fea
Read more