fall in love

what you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. it will decide what gets you out of bed in the mornings, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you.

fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
- pedro arrupe,s.j.

I can't remember when I first heard this quote, but I'm pretty sure it factored into my sophomore year experience with the Spiritual Exercises--a 5-day silent retreat based on the 30-day silent retreat all Jesuits participate in at least twice during their formation.

Find the thing that sets your heart and soul on fire. Find that calling, that vocation, that spark.

I feel like my entire college experience centered around this central truth--to find what I loved and pursue it. And I did. Whether it was a spring break trip to Mississippi to build houses with Habitat, or a retreat weekend on Cape Cod, or choosing to major in sociology rather than something more "practical," I embraced my passions at in college. The community created the space for me to explore and discover and dig in.

I've done it in my post-college ("real") life too--I taught 2nd grade for three years and it was the definition of the thing I loved getting me out of bed every morning. The experience wounded me and my spirit in other ways, but inside that classroom, surrounded by those kids, I was safe and happy and full of joy.

And now I pursue the love of God and faith and service and justice. It is a love that was nurtured and encouraged during those college years, and a vocation that was modeled by wonderful, strong, compassionate women. All the roads have led me here, to these 350 girls, to the unique challenges and obstacles posed by my current position.

Now, it's a matter of keeping the fire alive and the love fresh. Sometimes it's easy to get bogged down with the bad days or the frustrations of the job. Some days, the girls' negativity and attitude rubs off and I wonder what I'm doing here. But I always come back to the love, to the fact that I do believe I am supposed to be doing this, to the fact that even after a hard day, the girls are what get me out of bed at that ungodly hour of the morning.

Campus ministry is this nebulous position--it usually involves some combination of teaching religion, organizing retreats, overseeing service, and preparing the masses and prayer services for the school. In my case, I am responsible for all 4 and then some. The revolving door of campus ministers before me have left little upon which to build. So I'm starting from the ground up--which is both exciting and overwhelmingly terrifying. I'm almost through the year--I've almost survived one cycle. There are things to change, things to improve, things to overhaul, and things that I simply need to execute better. I've spent a good part of the last two weeks talking to other campus ministers in other places and it has been comforting to discover we're all in similar boats.

(Who am I kidding? We're not in boats...we're in dinghies...no, more like homemade Lost-style rafts!)