begin.

When I turned 50 a few weeks ago I crossed a threshold. I felt I had finished something and was entering something new. It was all very fuzzy and mushy and trite, but it was also quite real. Through choices I have made in my first 50, I have created a life for myself that is too full, too intense and frankly, occasionally quite unpleasant. I decided to take a real good look at my life and figure out what I wanted to do with my last 50 years.

Let me look. I take care of a whole bunch of things all over my life. I am a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister, a friend, a chaplain, and the person in my family that has been the "goody two shoes", choosing the "right thing" without too much thought. My mother is ill, she has dementia among other ailments, and has moved in with me. I am now her primary caregiver. My children have moved away and become independent individuals. I have been working out in the world, helping however I can with finances, since I was thirteen. I have had many different jobs and some careers, in myriad fields with various levels of success and failure. In the last 25 years I have been following a call to the ministry. Thirteen of those years have been as an ordained minister, and now a chaplain. At this moment in time, my faith is very strong, my calling intact, but my clergy career is quite confused. The work I have found is, in many ways, non-traditional, in that is no longer based inside the church building, but at the bedside of the ill and dying, or in the classroom. Maintaining the balance between all the different aspects, and locations, of my ministry is a challenge I have yet to achieve.

Though I am privileged to do meaningful and soulful work, my income is constantly under threat of collapse, an unfortunate consequence of years and years of compromise in order to put my husbands job and my family first. In retrospect, I like most of my past decisions, but not all. I like my life now, mostly. Truth: I am tired, sometimes, with a fatigue that far exceeds my stamina. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of my life, and one source of my fatigue, is the nagging reality that my life, because I am a caregiver, is not just my own. I am living in a whirlwind of transitions and it is time to take advantage of the chaos, and create. This blog is my own account, my narcissistic adventure perhaps, into that chaos, in the hopes of finding guidance, answers, a little glimpse of a clue, what to do next. I have chosen a life of service, but I am no saint. I have a driven need to survive as well. Let it begin.

Amen