There is a doe and two fawns I watch too closely. I see her most days, just past Huckleberry road, and before I pass Jackpine. We saw them first last spring when the littles were all wobble legged and spotted. They are yearlings now, almost her size but not quite. I count them out, “1, 2 oh where is the third?! Oh…there she is” and I sigh deep. I am somehow all tangled up with that doe and her fawns wandering around the Rich. If there is anything you can say about me, it is that I am a reckless romantic, finding meaning where there might be none.

That bush is on fire is it not? Burning up with the things of God. What, you can’t see it? Are you blind?

I watched “Big Fish” for the 1 millionth time this week and wept like a child again. Us storytellers do that. You can tell me about that time you went shopping for shoes and I will wonder what it taught you. How were you tossing light while you walked? What of the kingdom upside down did you bring along for the ride? What great character did you meet? Did they challenge your capacity for the peace or did you just come along side, see the gift of the co-created moment.

It freaks me out when people talk about calling as a far off thing. As something they are working towards becoming. A job they will someday get and then they will “BE IT”. You know that is all fading right? That none of it will stand? You can be a preacher but unless you are preaching all the time regardless of your vocation you ain’t no preacher. And I, well you know I love the words, as reckless as I am with them, as ill-equipped as I am to write, still I do. There is no book contract on my horizon, this will never make me an income and yet still I write, because it is the only place the whole world comes together in my head. I am in graduate school and I am having fun. Imagine if it was my job to sit and speak of ideas and healing and all the good things? It will put food on the table and adventure in my lap, but my calling will not be to teach. I am to mother these children well, to lay down my life, put it aside for the little people. Still that is not the whole of my call. A calling is not the thing you do, it is the way we move. 

My calling, and yours too, is to be the salt and the light wherever we walk. We walk in the way of the freedom fighters, and we are to speak the language of the prophets. I want my kids to see the big story that lies just beneath the surface of all the things we do. The way I want them to tell the stories of our strange adventures and the way I want them to question if they really experienced that…Did I imagine that fantastical evening? The way the skies burned bright with stars? I want them to sit around, moments before I die someday with all the people who brushed up against our life. The way I want them to celebrate a life lived to the edges, to the depths. I hope they will say something about the way I loved people, the light of God that leaked out of the edges of my life. The way we sought the glory laden in the mundane of these dailies and perhaps someday, when we return to the dust and the funeral procession is coming, there will be people there shouting about our freedom songs how it rang  from our rafters.