Vocation

At Holden Village, the community and Lutheran retreat center where my family lives and works, we have a prayer that we say when people leave the village. It’s called the Prayer of Good Courage:

O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This prayer has taken many forms in my life but it has been especially relevant over the past few weeks. Of particular interest right now are all of the unknowns—ventures, paths, perils; my life has got them all. In a year and a half, I will graduate and, although I have a vague semblance of a plan, I have no overall picture of what my calling is or where I will end up. Meanwhile, my brother is applying to colleges across the country with all the uncertainty that that entails and in five weeks, my family will leave Holden after more than five years of calling it home. There is a lot to accomplish in this five-week period: packing, shipping, cleaning, finishing construction of a teardrop trailer, applying to colleges, planning for the future, and upon departure, my family will set out on a six month road trip around the country, making a home in a hand-built teardrop trailer pulled by a minivan that’s as old as I am. Needless to say, untrodden paths and perils unknown have been key components in our lives lately.

When I talked to my dad on the phone this past weekend, he talked about how he’s heard the Prayer of Good Courage in a different light since we found out two weeks ago that we’re moving. Specifically, he said, the part about ‘ventures of which we cannot see the ending’ has taken on an entirely new meaning. Over the past five years, my dad has overseen a number of projects around the village including undergrounding the electrical system and redoing the water system. These projects have essentially been completed by now but he has also been planning for an expansion of our hydroelectric plant and the building of a new power plant at a different location. He’s made a lot of progress but neither of those projects will be completed in five weeks. They are ventures of which he cannot and will not see the ending.

On the one hand, this is discouraging. Part of the joy of working on an important project is looking forward to seeing its completion and success. But it’s also a good reminder that sometimes, we are called to lay the groundwork for others. We may be called to do things that we will never see come to fruition. But we can hope that one day someone else will be called to finish them.

No matter what we tell ourselves about what will happen later, however, times like these—times of transition—are still hard. We look around and wish we had more time because we had all these things we wanted to accomplish and places that we wanted to go and things we wanted to see. I, for instance, wish I could have come home this summer to pack up my room and say goodbye to my favorite hiking trails instead of watching from afar as a wildfire burned up the valley. My dad wishes he could finish his projects and leave everything tied up nicely. My mom wishes she could have had more time and didn’t have to say goodbye just yet. My brother probably wishes college applications didn’t involve writing so many essays and that he could just travel around in his teardrop trailer for the rest of his life.

But that’s not what we’ve been called to do. We’ve been called to make a new home somewhere else, to be proud of the things we have accomplished and hopeful that someone else will be called to finish the projects we couldn’t, we’ve been called to cherish the time that we’ve had and hope that goodbyes will one day turn into hellos. We’ve been called to have faith—the faith to trust that the path we’re following doesn’t lead us off a cliff, the faith to believe that there is a path at all, the faith to go out with good courage. Because none of us know where we’re going—my brother doesn’t know where he’ll go to college, I don’t know what I’ll do when I graduate, my parents don’t know where they’re going to be living or what their jobs will be. We are one hot mess of a family right now. But our whole community is praying right alongside us that God’s hand will lead us and God’s love will support us. Amidst all of our unknowns and all of our uncertainties, we know that God will always be our foundation, holding us up and leading us on. We don’t know what form that will take or where it will actually lead us but we know that God’s hand will be there to guide us, and God’s love will support us, as we venture with good courage into the unknown.