I’m sitting at work, at my desk… my empty desk.  The day has been spent going through paperwork and memory-filled-cards and mementoes from the past five years.   I have sorted through my professional life and what is left to this point sits in an assortment of boxes on my office floor.

I am leaving my job this week. Pandora keeps reminding me with song titles like, Let Go, Opportunity to Cry, Be OK, and Only Hope.  This has been a job I have loved and one that has loved me.  I have worked in student life at Azusa Pacific University for five years.  Five years. In my short life, that is a large amount of time.  The opportunity to work here has launched my career, taught me more lessons than I can count and shaped me into the person I am today.

Amazing Staff

This has been a year of discernment and asking big questions.  Since the book came out in September, I have had small inklings of, “Okay, what’s next?”  My activator/achiever (yes, I have both on the strengths-finder) was kicking in, not quite kicking wildly, but starting to get a little restless.

I had no expectations for the book when it came out except that people who need it would be able to find it. And slowly, that has been happening.  As I said, I began to ask myself what this meant: to be a writer.  I looked around at others in my new field and scratched my head a bit.  The one-year phenomena I wrote about a few days ago perplexed me and I didn’t like the idea of “A Beautiful Mess for Cat Lovers” or matching mugs and calendars.  I wasn’t a fan of quick selling self-help guides or books designed to pay the publisher a pretty penny while I did all of the work.  Being just a “writer” seemed like a murky path at this juncture of my life.

So I paced.  I paced a lot in my mind, in my office, in my yard, in my dreams.  I asked myself a lot of questions about what I wanted my life to be about.  I held a lot in my prayers and meditations – but namely everything I held was about asking for a door to open, a window to crack.  I hastily made up my mind to choose what I had always known because I didn’t hear an answer. However, one of my newer friends, whose soul I feel like I have known forever, said, “I think you’re being called out of what is comfortable.”  I was amazed at her clarity in that moment.  She was being, what I define as, a good friend. The best. It wasn’t an answer, but it was what I needed to hear.

She pushed me forward and gave me contacts… she said I needed to teach.  Teach?  Really?  I went into student life to be out of the classroom.  But as I started to converse with a few trusted advisors in my life, my other friend said, “Kristin, what you love is academia. You will never be outside of that.  It makes perfect sense that you would pursue your doctorate.”  A PhD? But I’m young, I’m inexperienced… and I’m running out of excuses.  The truth is I do have experience and I am qualified.  It is funny how hard that is to say sometimes. Read More »