The Place Where Calling is Found
I hope you are safe and healthy. I hope you’ve made a rhythm for yourself at home. If you haven’t, that’s ok too. We’re all in this together.
My wife Becky and I, our bodies are in good health, and not being glued to the news has kept our minds from getting sick too. Becky does a much better job of navigating through these tough emotions, grieving the life we had a few weeks before, and seeing a future of lost opportunity and uncertainty. The way I’ve been processing this is by writing to you.
January and February feels like a lifetime ago. I had to look at past newsletters to remember what I was thinking about and hoping for this coming year:
- I wanted to be more generous to others and to myself.
- I wanted to reimagine my work to do something that was meaningful and sustainable.
- I wanted to go deeper in making intentional rest a consistent rhythm in my life.
- I wanted to become healthier.
- I wanted to overcome my mindsets of scarcity and feeling like a fraud.
If I were to tell Becky or a friend, “Hey I really want to work on these things about me this year. What if I clear my schedule for the next three months, live off my savings, and figure all this out?” It would be a reckless and ridiculous question to ask.
As March comes to an end, here I am living out that reckless and ridiculous question. The answer was thrusted upon me and my fellow creatives, and it’s not the way I imagined it to be.
Projects I’ve been developing for months are postponed or canceled. A conference I’ve photographed the past three years in July is going virtual, meaning there is nothing for me to photograph. I don’t know when people will feel safe enough to come together for weddings, events, or even want to have their portraits taken. “Social distancing” is the antithesis of how I work as a photographer. Even after this passes, as long as we can see this pandemic in our rear view mirror, my industry won’t be the same.
The horizon is clear before me now, and everyday is a choice to see what’s in front of me as an open field, or as a dry desert.
There’s a quote by Frederick Buechner I rediscovered this week, and it’s helped me connect who I was before this pandemic to the person I want to be on the other side of this. He describes one’s calling as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
When this year started there was a momentum: projects being booked and the year shaping itself like the ones passed. I was grateful to be doing what I do, and I didn’t want to stop it, in fear of being an irresponsible freelancer. But I’ve been aching to discover the deep gladness inside me; challenging work that would require all of my strengths and abilities to meet the world’s deep gladness.
The list I made was an attempt to articulate that gladness, the place where that deeper work lived, a place where I am safe to pour myself into my work, to be vulnerable and generous. With the help of a small but mighty community, I’ve been uncovering the work I’m deeply glad to do: telling stories.
Storytelling is what comes most naturally to me. It’s what I do here when I’m explaining an idea or a lesson to you. It’s the best way I know how to make an impact in the world. My friends will tell you I always have a story to tell, and yet it’s taken me so long to admit it to myself.
But that was who I am before this open field was laid in front of me. Now, I see a path in front of me with nothing in the way. It feels like I’m starting all over again. The times are uncertain, but I’m on my way to the place of my calling.
