No, literally I’m out of town. We’re back in Kentucky at our alma mater, Asbury University (formerly Asbury College). Our oldest is now a film student here and we’re back for the Highbridge Film Festival.
Pausing for a commercial, we got a brief tour of the state-of-the-art communications arts building and last night saw the premier of the student produced sitcom. Asbury is the only college or university in the nation to teach a class in sitcom. The professor comes with the experience of directing Nickleodeon’s first Kid’s Choice Awards and over 200 episodes of The Golden Girls. Right now a team of students is preparing to travel to London to work as media interns for the Summer Olympics. A team from Asbury goes every two years and our son hopes to be in Russia for the Winter Olympics in 2014. (end of commercial)
But I find myself on another journey longing to write yet ill-equipped to do so. I didn’t even pack the laptop this weekend. Let’s all pause to sing with Janice, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a brand new iPad”?
Here in this small town I return to to my roots, to my heritage. It was here I was grounded in my faith, and when I find those times when that faith is tested or more likely I have faltered it is here among these buildings that I am reminded that His mercies are new every morning.
My wife and I went to breakfast at Shakertown, a place where it is a “gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free.” It’s a place steeped in history where Union and Confederate troops camped on either side but did not fight because the pacifist Shakers asked them not to. The Shakers fed them all.
Just like last weekend that was full of family history that made me want to tell stories this weekend is yet another confirmation. I have a calling to write. It’s as though more than thirty years later I finally know what my major should be.
I think I knew then that I should write. But I didn’t quite know how to make it happen. Or maybe it’s that I needed these thirty years of life to experience cancer, politics, financial struggles, parenthood (see financial struggles) and literal matters of life and death to finally have something to say.
Perhaps that has all been part of my journey on my way to becoming the writer I long to be. Maybe even the writer I’m called to be.
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1 comments
I know the feelings well Michael. Very well.