I’m sitting at work, at my desk… my empty desk.  The day has been spent going through paperwork and memory-filled-cards and mementoes from the past five years.   I have sorted through my professional life and what is left to this point sits in an assortment of boxes on my office floor.

I am leaving my job this week. Pandora keeps reminding me with song titles like, Let Go, Opportunity to Cry, Be OK, and Only Hope.  This has been a job I have loved and one that has loved me.  I have worked in student life at Azusa Pacific University for five years.  Five years. In my short life, that is a large amount of time.  The opportunity to work here has launched my career, taught me more lessons than I can count and shaped me into the person I am today.

Amazing Staff

This has been a year of discernment and asking big questions.  Since the book came out in September, I have had small inklings of, “Okay, what’s next?”  My activator/achiever (yes, I have both on the strengths-finder) was kicking in, not quite kicking wildly, but starting to get a little restless.

I had no expectations for the book when it came out except that people who need it would be able to find it. And slowly, that has been happening.  As I said, I began to ask myself what this meant: to be a writer.  I looked around at others in my new field and scratched my head a bit.  The one-year phenomena I wrote about a few days ago perplexed me and I didn’t like the idea of “A Beautiful Mess for Cat Lovers” or matching mugs and calendars.  I wasn't a fan of quick selling self-help guides or books designed to pay the publisher a pretty penny while I did all of the work.  Being just a “writer” seemed like a murky path at this juncture of my life.

So I paced.  I paced a lot in my mind, in my office, in my yard, in my dreams.  I asked myself a lot of questions about what I wanted my life to be about.  I held a lot in my prayers and meditations – but namely everything I held was about asking for a door to open, a window to crack.  I hastily made up my mind to choose what I had always known because I didn’t hear an answer. However, one of my newer friends, whose soul I feel like I have known forever, said, “I think you’re being called out of what is comfortable.”  I was amazed at her clarity in that moment.  She was being, what I define as, a good friend. The best. It wasn’t an answer, but it was what I needed to hear.

She pushed me forward and gave me contacts… she said I needed to teach.  Teach?  Really?  I went into student life to be out of the classroom.  But as I started to converse with a few trusted advisors in my life, my other friend said, “Kristin, what you love is academia. You will never be outside of that.  It makes perfect sense that you would pursue your doctorate.”  A PhD? But I’m young, I’m inexperienced… and I’m running out of excuses.  The truth is I do have experience and I am qualified.  It is funny how hard that is to say sometimes.

As I looked at the world around me, particularly of higher education and publishing, there is quite a bit of responsibility being sacrificed in the name of profit, fame, and tradition.  Consuming is the name of the game.  But I have watched my life take a drastically different route the past three years since I finished the first draft of A Beautiful Mess.  Fame and profit have not been in the driver’s seat…. Trust me.  My publishing deal was so untraditional that I paid for everything upfront, even though I had a publisher.  But it was the right decision for me.  It was and continues to be a slower road.   It is a path of production and producing something has a cost; much more of a cost than consuming something.

Nate and I have realized this since our little garden turned into a small farm in the past two years.  We know that if we want to relax, we have to leave our house.  Of course there are moments we curl up to read or just unwind and have a BBQ, but the chickens call us back to reality rather quickly and then there’s the weeds, the fruit trees, the corn and pumpkins, trading seeds and tips with neighbors…

Our backyard

We told our pastor recently that we were going on vacation after we had said realization and he replied with an understanding tone, “Of course, because your home is a place of production, not just consumption.”

A lightbulb went on over my head.  That’s it. That’s why we’re so weird.  We want our land to produce, our brains to keep engaged with our souls and to keep pushing the boundaries of what is “normal.”  We are deeply entrenched living our lives in an intentionally healthy space.  This has meant hours of conversation, silence, therapy, and gardening.  It has meant learning about ourselves, our community, and our God at an entirely deeper level.

I find myself drifting further and further away from clichés – in my home, in my writing, and on twitter (land of clichés) to get in touch with what will help people the most.

I’m not sure what that is yet, but I think it looks a lot simpler than I envision it now.  Simplicity does not mean easy though and that scares me.

So, after taking the GRE last week and finding myself appropriately average according to the test scores, I am applying to go back to school (if they’ll have me) and heading into the classroom this fall as a university faculty member to dialogue about these ideas.  It is my hope to help produce, not only my own food, but critically thinking scholars who will go on to keep producing a quality of life that does not revolve around fame, money or instant gratification.  The classroom is the place to dive into those ideas.  Writing more of these ideas down will encourage others to think about them too.

I’m choosing another slow road.  A rather unflashy journey of farming and schooling – of drifting further to the margins, of peeling back more layers of myself and my soil.  And not because canning your own fruit is so trendy right now.

So I sit here in a very sobering space of what used to be my office and wonder what next week will bring?  Next year? The next five years?  It has the potential to rock me to core.  It is a risk that will push me to the edge.  It sounds so much easier to stay right where I am… but God never promised it would be easy.

In a time when, as someone on Facebook put it, 15-year-olds are running congress, I can’t think of a better time to slow down, ask big questions and try challenging myself to live out of a deeper place.  I don’t want to ascend; I want to learn more about the spiritual calling of simplicity.   So as of now, I’m choosing a route that is not easy, but I know I won’t be alone.  And that is enough.