When the Invitation Is a Long Time Coming
5/18/21
Dear friend,
We've been talking about how to live into invitations in a practical way once they come. But what if the invitation takes a while to come clear? What does the practical part look like then?
When you can sense something emerging but don't know what it is or how long it will take to get here or how it might invite something new of you and your life, what do you do? How do you live in that ambiguous waiting place? Is there anything you can do to speed it along?
I'll start by saying I don't know that we can speed the pace of discernment. It comes when it comes. The time is ripe when the time is ripe.
But I do believe we can do things in the meantime.
The first is to continue tending the discernment.
Remember when we did that smaller series near the beginning of this series that helped you get to know your ways of discernment? (If you missed it, you can find those entries here, here, here, and here.)
At that point in the series, you were invited to notice things like what your yes feels like and what it has historically looked like for you to reach your places of discernment. You were invited to notice what helps you tune in to your inner knowing and places of listening and prayer.
When you're waiting for the invitation to come clear, when it's taking a long time and you're not sure what will emerge, I encourage you to keep tending your identified ways of discernment in your life.
For me, that usually looks like:
going to images in prayer and conversing with them
meeting with my spiritual director
sharing the questions with others in my life who help me listen and notice
trusting it will eventually become clear
These have always been the things that have helped me along. They keep me grounded and tuned in. They may not speed the discernment, but they keep it in front of me, keep me turned in the direction of what's trying to emerge, ensure I notice the emergence when it comes.
The other thing is to keep being faithful to what's here.
When I think of long discernment seasons when I've sensed an invitation emerging that hasn't yet come clear, two of my own come immediately to mind.
The first is the eight years I spent being shaped and grown in spiritual direction and formation spaces while also serving as a book editor for multiple publishers who contracted me to edit their authors' books.
The editorial work was my bread and butter. I'd started working in publishing and editorial in 1999 and never stopped, even when I started my training in matters of spirit and soul in 2008.
I did both at the same time, all the way until 2016, sensing the whole time it would not always be that way, that at some point one of the two would necessarily give way to the other.
What did I do in those long eight years of waiting and listening and discerning?
I kept tending the discernment (like I said above, in point #1), and I kept being faithful to what was in front of me. I kept editing the book projects that came along, and I kept tending to the spiritual formation community that had gathered around my own writing and work in online spaces.
Eventually, the invitation did come clear—it brought Bookwifery into my life—but for a long time it was a slow and faithful work in two directions at once.
The other time that comes to mind is when I was invited to close Bookwifery for a full-time commitment to the Light House community. This is a discernment that took more than a year to come clear.
I sensed a change was coming, but I couldn't fathom how it would. I cared about all of Bookwifery's authors and their books, and I knew a contemplative approach to book publishing was needed and valuable to many. But my work and contribution felt like they were shifting.
What did that mean? How would it happen? What about all the people it would affect?
This discernment was hard and long, and I just kept tending the questions and noticings in all the ways I knew how to do. And until the wisdom emerged, I kept being faithful to what was there—kept serving the authors, kept bringing what I could bring to them, kept serving what was also emerging with the Light House.
Is there an invitation long in coming for you right now? Have you been sensing an emergence that's not yet here? How might it be helpful to you to keep tending your discernment and being faithful to what's here while you wait?
Yours in the waiting and the tending,
Christianne