Thursday, June 16, 2011

mr. luke and the disappearing identity

First off, apologies for the lateness of this post. I hope that the subject matter of it will help you to understand why it's so late.

Right now I am sitting in an Embassy Suites hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. I'm up here for Chris Gatton and Jessica Davis' wedding, and I couldn't be happier about it. I left KC at 6:00 AM, arrived about five hours later, and have been going non-stop since then. Tomorrow/today/Friday will include the wedding and me staying with the new friends I made. Then on Saturday I leave Columbus at 7:20, land in Boston around noon, and will be at camp around dinnertime. After that the summer really starts.

While up here, and even before, people ask what I plan on doing after camp. This comes after my explanation and reasons for being a twenty-four year-old who plans on living at his parents house after he goes to camp for the summer. And I have no answer for them. I don't know who or what I want to be when I grow up. I have the beginnings of an idea, but have not been able to think through it. Which made me think about why I can't think through it. I have nothing if I don't have my meta-cognition, right?

For the past two years I was working at Harvest Hands, and if you want to see how I feel about that just read my last post. But because I had thrown so much of myself into the Harvest I lost something: my identity. I became a coffee roaster, an after-school program mentor, or to put it simply: Mr. Luke. I became what I had to in order to make that job work, and I did an ok job at it. But now that I am finished at Harvest Hands I'm presented with the unique problem of attempting to work out who I am without Harvest Hands. I tried very hard to think about it the last week of work, but to no avail. It felt like my feet were not grounded anywhere. I was trying to figure out how to walk on solid ground while in the ocean. I felt like Elwin Ransom in "Perelandra." And as far as I can tell it's just going to take some time to get my sea legs.

So my goal for the fall isn't to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. It's to figure out who the heck I am. I hope to get some of this accomplished while at Brookwoods, but I don't know if that's gonna happen. When I get back to Kansas City I plan on cultivating old and new relationships, I plan on helping people out in special ways, and I plan on learning more about me and you.

I hope (and pray) that I end up finding my identity in Christ. I'll continue to attempt to do so, I just hope that He helps me along the way.

Luke
luketlancaster@gmail.com

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