Tonight I hosted one of my favorite people, Sandy Smoker, at my house for supper. Sandy & met 2 years ago at a leadership retreat. We have become good friends over the past 2 years, getting together monthly. Sandy is an HR director and is 12 years older than me. We have different life experiences which adds so much to our already natural compatibility.
Sandy asked a question tonight that is interesting to ponder: "How do we determine success in life?" It may be in parenting, marriage, career, a sermon, a pie, a clean house, a new outfit ... but how do we decide if we are successful? And who decides that? Sandy and I have discussed before that one nice thing about being students was that we were constantly getting evaluative feedback, and since both of us were/are good students, it was a constant feeling of success. But now, how do we define success? I don't know -- yet I know it is still important -- at least for me.
Yesterday, before preaching at University Mennonite Church in State College (where I attended from 1996-98 while in grad school), I saw Todd Davis (a former colleague of mine at Goshen College. Todd is an English professor at Penn State now and a really good guy. I was surprised to see his family there, as I didn't know he was now teaching at PSU). After my sermon, Todd and his wife came up to me and Todd said, "You are an amazing preacher! You have really found your calling. When you left teaching at GC, I was really sad, because I thought, 'she's such a good teacher and this isn't the best thing for the students' ... but now that I see what you are doing and why you left, this is definitely the right thing for you to be doing." Then he told me, "Dave Miller (the former pastor at UMC) is a really good preacher ... but I would say, you are just as good as he is." To me, that was a huge compliment, as I know what a good preacher Dave is.
Todd's words of affirmation were very genuine and sincere. And they meant a lot to me. Maybe that's why yesterday I felt such a strong sense of emotion in my role as pastor. It felt good to preach again, to be in a public role, to be in leadership, having had 3 weeks off. Yet, there are many days in my pastoral work, that I don't know if I did anything valuable. I find during my sabbatical, so many of my "to do" list projects are "product-producing," meaning, I have a tangible ending product: baking bread, stripping my back stairway, getting my photo albums up-to-date. These are all things that I enjoy doing, but I am realizing that I'm enjoying them even more right now as I can see concrete results (and thus, some success.) How do we continue to find success is our lives -- even if we don't have tangible markers for that? And how will I continue to find time for tangible, product-producing projects when I return to pastoring full time?
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Sue- I find myself resonating with this entry as a mom who stays home with kids, on a hiatus from the working world right now too. I have done much introspection over the last 5 years about "what is productive?" "what is success?" "What is contentment for me in this life stage?"
"What is my role in the absence of my career which previously served as a major part of my identity?" As in every job, staying at home involves both tangible and intangible tasks with both tangible and intangible results. I enjoy marking the tangible tasks off of the to-do lists and often forget about the intangible results of parenting. So- for me, I struggle to feel fully energized or satisfied with what feels like merely completing the tangible tasks, which are admittedly necessary and important, yet not life-giving for me.
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