The silence I hold in me now seems less about the details of what has happened to me, and more about who I am becoming in the midst of these happenings. Everything changes. Everything. In an instant. It's all temporary. It's all passing. Life is fleeting. This year showed me that jobs come and go, we move to new places and see the world leaving behind only fading footprints, our hearts recede and then swell again like waves in an ocean. And in the midst of change, there is some small drop of divinity within each of us that points back to a larger constant.
I've been having a little bit of an identity crisis. Going from trekking through the jungles of Africa to directing a social work program and "professoring" every day at a proper university are two very different things. Very. Different. Things.
If you know anything about me, you know that I love my job. Like, I'm head over heels in love with the work that I get to do. And this has never been more true. I believe in this work wholeheartedly, and I have poured my life into the people of Missouri and of Mozambique in service to this ministry.
And so, it is so very bittersweet to let you know that I will be leaving the Mozambique Initiative in July to begin a new position as the Director of Social Work and Assistant Professor at Trevecca University in Nashville, Tennessee.
On Saturday I woke at 6am, wedged myself into a packed 4-wheel drive vehicle, and proceeded to travel to a village called Cuamba located in the Niassa District of Mozambique. Cuamba is accessible via passages that I can only vaguely compare to "roads". A distance that might have taken us 4 hours in the USA took literally 10 hours on these muddy, safari paths. The rain continued to pour as we forged rivers and slid through mud for the entire day with the goal of reaching this village by nightfall. There was only one time that we had to be pulled from the mud with a chain and a good-Samaritan-like passing tractor, and I consider us extremely lucky.
I'm bad at details. I hate the excel sheets, the line items, the itty bitty teeny weeny to dos, the nuts, the bolts...the details. I can do this stuff if I have to, and I often do, but I loathe this type of work and I quickly get bored. Now, I have tremendous respect for folks who are gifted in this area and I could not function without these people in my life, but I'm just not that person.
Despite these flaws, as it turns out, I do have a few strengths. And one such strength lies in being a big picture person. I am a dreamer of dreams and I can almost literally see them coming to life in my mind's eye. I see visions, and I know how to talk about them in such a way as to get people excited and interested, passionate and engaged. I'm a hopeless optimist and an endless believer in the human capacity for love, change, and growth. How I actually take the tiny steps to live out these awesome visions that I cast is often inconsequential to me in the moment, but I believe in them so much that it almost doesn't matter. Silly, I know, but true.
I've been in my position as the Associate Director of the Mozambique Initiative for just over three years now, and I can't even begin to describe all of the ways that my experiences in Mozambique have changed my life. As I contemplate the new year ahead and attempt to incorporate the lessons I've learned during this time, here are 5 key habits that are significantly changing in my life since taking this job: