Calling

Today happens to be my birthday.  My fiance surprised me with a weekend away in Salt Lake City and Park City for some skiing, snowshoeing, and Utah fun.  What a wonderful break from the day to day.

It's back to the grindstone today.  I am paging my way through the current Lutheran magazine, something I hope to read more regularly as I continue on this path to someday be a Lutheran pastor.  The whole March mag seems to be about vocation, calling, vocational identity (pastoral identity in my case).  Peter Marty wrote the opening article.  One paragraph caught my eye - I love how he defines what it's like to have a calling.  I had to share:

"If you are ever wondering what it is really like to experience a true calling, just be ready for the next time you find yourself totally absorbed in something.  Your energy is high.  Your have lost all sense of time.  Your passion is unmistakable.  A great sense of satisfaction has overtaken you.  This is typically when we experience one of the greatest possible luxuries in life - the inability to know for sure whether we are working or doing something else altogether."  (Peter Marty, The Lutheran Magazine, March 2011)

We all have a calling.  Sometimes we are lucky enough to have our calling be the same as our vocation.  As I think about graduates across the spectrum, I hope this quote can inspire someone like me - who just wanted to be told what would be best for me to do.  Unfortunately, that doesn't exactly happen - there might be voices who tell you what to do, but I don't think anyone can know as well as God what it is you would be best at.  It really is a process of discernment, one that lasts a lifetime.  

Happy New Year

It's a new year.  And this year will be significant because I am getting married.  I guess every year is significant in its own right, but this is one that I know about ahead of time.  I'm not the resolution type - seems like a waste of time to me because by February all that one has hoped to do is long gone.  But I realized last night I could make a resolution this year - in 2011 I'm going to get married.  Ha. :)

I made an expensive, big-deal purchase yesterday.  I bought a wedding dress!  While Tom and I have reserved and put deposits on a number of things (ceremony and reception locations, catering, and now a photographer!), buying the dress felt like a huge step - one that means this is really going to happen.  Crazy.  I'm a little nervous because there were no stores that carried the dress I wanted so I am ordering blind and won't see it and try it on until the end of May.  And I'm still a little disappointed that I had to give into the system of wedding dresses...  I had wanted so badly to buy one on consignment - God knows I don't need someone to make a brand new dress for me to wear for a day - better for the environment, and hopefully easier on the wallet.  Unfortunately that is not an easy route to go.  As it should be, every girl has their dress tailored to them which means it fits their body.  And the chances of someone else's body being the same as mine...very slim.  Needless to say I did check out two bridal consignment shops in Denver (Altar Bridal and Eco-Bridal) and they had some great stuff, but nothing that fit me well enough to buy (and pay about the price I was looking to pay for a new dress anyway) and then have altered.  I was so bummed.  But I am so excited with what I ended up with.  I can't wait to see it in May and finally try it on!

Tom and I leave for vacation in five days.  Both of us are ready for some time off!  And I'm a little nervous about the time off part because we'll be visiting friends and family and that doesn't usually lend itself to much time off.  But we will fit it in.  We need it.  And then our parents are going to meet for the first time...

Internship...it's still going.  I will say this Christmas I didn't feel very merry...six worship services in three days is a bit much for me and didn't feel much like Christmas.  But that's the road Tom and I get to figure out now - how to create new traditions to make Christmas merry for us.  Because the church part was mostly hectic, and honestly I kinda felt like McDonald's.  People came to fill their order for the year and that's it.  Where's the authentic side of it?  I know not all people fall into that category on Christmas Eve or Day, but that's what it felt like for my first experience in a pastor role.  I felt used and abused.

One new practice we are doing this year is to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas.  Christmas Day is day one and on from there.  (The secular counting down to Christmas as the 12th day has no ground.)  We made a list before Christmas of things we wanted to do to celebrate Christmas every day.  Our list included things like going to the movies (we saw Tron in 3D), watching Christmas movies at home (we watched White Christmas), going out to eat (we had a coupon to use at Joe's Crab Shack :)), going shopping (exchanges!), going ice skating (soon to happen with our new friends JC and KM and IMC), walking or driving to appreciate Christmas lights, etc.  It's been fun to have something every day that we are consciously choosing to do to celebrate Christmas.

That's enough for today.  May you experience God Incarnate - God in your world and the world around you - on this 8th day of Christmas and the rest of the year.