Life’S New Chapter Brings Challenges

I’m starting a significant new chapter in my life, thanks to a painful and faith-challenging end to the previous chapter.

I share this today because you may have made similar adjustments in your life. How did you do it?

For me, the change is both exhilarating and very scary. And every moment is a reminder of how little I normally trust God’s trust in me.

The brief story of how I’m changing from one life chapter to another begins this way: Until July 9, I was the administrator of an assisted-living facility in Sandpoint. The company had owned our business only since April 1, so we were still getting used to one another.

On this particular day, the regional supervisor came for his first visit to our facility. One of his tasks there was to fire me.

I was gone without warning, without time to say good-bye to residents or other staff. End of chapter!

What a horrible and strange experience, getting fired. Never happened to me before. And yes, I’m still working through some of the emotional debris that drifts into my path.

But another strange thing happened that day. Within a few hours of my being terminated (such a permanent, ugly word, isn’t it?), I was redirecting my focus and my attitude toward what I have wanted to do for four years.

It’s captured in a Japanese aphorism that I’ve quoted off and on for years: “Since my house burned down, I have a much better view of the sun.”

What a wonderful way to confirm joy and hope in the midst of despair or frustration!

In my particular situation, there is irony as well. The burned house in the aphorism becomes a metaphorical house built in my vocational dream.

What I call Welcome House has been a central part of my dream since I began constructing its theological framework four years ago. I’ve invited this column’s readers to walk through the framework from time to time. It’s called God’s Radical Hospitality.

Now it looks like it may be time to see how sturdy that framework really is. All I’ve been able to focus on since July 9 is how to open the doors to Welcome House.

I intend Welcome House to become a consultation ministry through which I can provide mediation services to conflicted people and congregations. Additionally, this ministry will offer to help congregations learn how conflict can transform, rather than deform, their church fellowship and mission.

But this is scary stuff, folks! And I don’t mean the work involved dealing with conflict in people and/or congregations. I mean trusting what God is wanting me to do with whatever skills I may possess.

I use the term “conflict transformation” in my new effort. It is my way to signal that conflict is fundamentally an issue of spirituality.

As such, techniques of conflict resolution - mediation being only one technique - need to be integrated with efforts to transform the spirit as well.

But Welcome House confronts me with the need to practice what I preach. The inner conflict I live with at this moment needs to be transformed by the trust I say I have in God’s Radical Hospitality.

Most of the time, that trust is nearly tangible. I can almost feel it, hear it, hold it.

At other times, questions whisper in my soul’s ear: “Why do you think you’re capable of pulling this off, Graves?” “Get practical. You need money for the mortgage, food, pension.”

I know I’m currently wrestling with what many of you have struggled with before. Perhaps very often. Perhaps for long periods of time. How do you endure? How do you stay patient? How do you stay faithful to the call you believe God has given you?

I think I know. But it would nice to know how God has walked with you through this.