Focus:
Trusting the signals our own bodies give us.
Repetition:
My body speaks to me and I am learning to listen.
Thirst, hunger, rest, and rhythm are gifts.
I trust the wisdom God built into me.
Following Your Dreams as a Healed Person
We have spent almost two years rebuilding these bodies. Now comes the question that matters most. What is this healed life for?
Do Not Let Go of What You Learned
Before we talk about dreams, let us promise each other something. We will not let go of the very important lessons we learned on this journey.
We learned to move slowly. We learned to listen to our bodies and to believe them. We learned to eat real food, to keep our rhythms, to get outside, to rest, and to pray. We learned that urgency is not the same as guidance.
Those lessons were expensive. They cost us years, tears, money, and a great deal of humility. Whatever we do next, we take them with us. A dream that costs you your health is not the dream God has for you.
A Vocation Is Important
A vocation is not the same thing as a job. Your vocation is what you were made for, the particular way you are called to love in this world. It matters, and the world is poorer when we do not answer it.
Many of us lost sight of ours while we were sick, because all of our strength went to surviving the day. Now there is strength left over, and that strength is asking to be used.
You Do Not Need a Practice to Change the World
Some of you will want to help others heal, and I hope you do. But please do not think that a practice, a title, or a platform is what makes a life count.
Think of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the men and women who went out into the Egyptian desert in the early centuries of the Church. They had no practices, no organisations, and no audiences. They prayed, they worked with their hands, they kept silence, they welcomed the occasional visitor, and they loved God. And they changed the entire world. People walked for days just to sit with them and ask for a word.
Never underestimate a life of prayer, a life at home with your family, or a life spent quietly tending a garden and a few animals. A slow, hidden, faithful life is not a consolation prize. It is often the thing the world most needs and least expects.
What Have You Felt Pulled To All This Time?
Sit with this question this week. What is it you have felt pulled to, this entire time? Think back to the long, hard days when you could not do much of anything. What did your mind keep wandering toward? What did you promise yourself you would do if you ever felt well again?
For some of you it is art, painting, sewing, pottery, or woodworking. For some it is writing, the book you have been carrying for years. For some it is music, or singing in your parish. For some it is the land, growing food, keeping bees, raising animals, or restoring a piece of creation. For some it is your family, and being fully present in your own home. For some it is teaching, or hospitality, or feeding people. For some it is bringing this healing work to others.
Write your answer down. Do not edit it and do not argue with it, just write it.
Building a Family
For many of you, the pull is toward children and family, and I want to speak to that gently. This can be done whether your fertility is intact or not. There are so many ways to mother and to father.
Adoption and foster care bring children into homes that were built for them. Godparenting is a real and lasting relationship, not a title for a photograph. Being the auntie or uncle to children who have very little family is a gift that changes a childhood. There are children in your parish, your neighbourhood, and your extended family who are quietly starving for one steady adult who is glad to see them.
You can be the one who remembers their birthday, teaches them to bake, takes them fishing, listens to them, and prays for them by name every single day. Spiritual motherhood and fatherhood are not lesser forms of the thing. They are the thing.
One Isolated Person
Volunteer work is beautiful, and it does not have to be grand. So many people are isolated today. There are elderly people in our communities who go whole weeks without a conversation. There are widows and widowers eating dinner alone, homebound neighbours, young mothers who have no one, people in nursing homes whose visitors have stopped coming, and people in our own parishes who sit alone every Sunday.
If each one of us offered our time and our presence to just one of them, we could change lives. Not a program, not a committee, just you and one person.
- Bring the meat stock.
- Sit on the porch.
- Drive them to an appointment.
- Call every Thursday.
- Learn their story and let them tell it again.
This is the kind of work that looks small and is enormous.
How to Begin Without Losing Your Footing
Start with prayer, and ask plainly to be shown. Notice how each possibility feels in your body, because we learned this in Week Twelve. A true call tends to feel calm, steady, and quietly persistent. Panic, urgency, and the need to prove something are dysregulation, not guidance.
Begin small, the way we began everything else. One hour a week, one student, one neighbour, one chapter, one raised bed. Protect your sleep, your meals, your movement, and your slowness while you build. Say no to good things that do not belong to you, so that you can say yes to the one that does. Let it grow at the pace of a living thing, not at the pace of a business plan.
Offer Yourself
Whatever you feel led to do, do not forget it. Do not let another year pass with that dream folded up in a drawer. You have been given a body that works, a mind that is clearing, a nervous system that is learning to rest, and a life that is yours again. Offer yourself to your new life of charity, hope, and faith.
“So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
Go and love with the health you have been given.