Of course, we never left it. But let’s return our focus to that way we walk. Not our passionate path but our impassioned one. That one laid by a divine hand for our feet alone... and, sometimes, blessedly, for our feet together with another’s. Walk with me a ways?
Years ago I did a blind audition for an internship up in Washington State with a small independent publishing house run by a woman just a few years older than me. I’d known her as an author before – a nationally bestselling one – but I had come to know her, through rumors and reviews, as a fearless, no-holds-barred business woman. I wanted to get with that. I wanted to explore that kind of guerilla publishing in the book and gaming world. I won the internship. That summer changed my life.
I was raised a New Testament Christian. As I’ve written before, that means something to some people and other things I others. It does *not* mean that I am a close-minded, bigoted, anti-gay, Republican who owns a gun, a big dog and a strange map of all the Planned Parenthood clinics (actually... I am *one* of these things... but I’ve also been called a “swing voter,” so go figure). I believe that going to church makes you a Christian just as much as standing in a garage makes you a car. I don’t believe in denominations (man’s law) and I do believe that what exists in nature is meant to be mirrored by man. All of this is set up for:
I’ve known what to look for my entire life. Before I was old enough to fully comprehend what “impassioned path” meant, I knew I had to find mine. I was never drifting or lost. But I never worked so hard – at such a thankless... and such a clearly *important* task – as that summer at that independent publishing house.
My goal in high school in Boston was to prove that wearing a leather jacket didn’t preclude getting straight A’s in AP math and science. I graduated a year early and auditioned (life is full of them, isn’t it?) at a performing arts school in New York City. Once on the inside I realized that I might very well be able to make a career out of that crazy acting thing but I was drawn to the “throw away” extracurricular course in acrylics. By the end of my time in the Big Apple, I had fallen in love with the 5’ x 5’ canvas and was painting, on average, six commissions a year.
I fell into painting. I fell into it so completely that my models were known to fall asleep and I wouldn’t notice. I fell into painting like a swimmer or a runner. I dropped pounds when I painted. I dropped time. I dropped my sense of self and place and mortality.
But painting wasn’t my impassioned path. And I knew it. I kept searching.
I thought sometimes about an older grrl I’d met when I was a preteen. She was an author on tour. I begged my mom to take me to see her. We waited in the long line. She signed my book. Her blue eyes were wise and sad and all those things that they talk about in high literature but that you never believe you’ll see in real life. I remember saying to my mother on the way home, “That’s not her path, is it, Mom?” She didn’t answer. Maybe she thought I was being melodramatic.
Turns out, years later, sometime before that grrl had designed a mathematically gorgeous trading card game operating system for my faith-and-science open world “Mardi Gras 3000,” she discovered that her path was being a mother to two brilliant, but special needs children, and being the most honest, demanding and innovative publisher that the independent world has ever seen.
That is her impassioned path. I like to think that it parallels mine. That sometimes, just sometimes, our paths even cross and we stand for a moment and wonder at it all.
I don’t find my path easy. But I have stayed up all night wondering if anyone ever finds their path easy. If any impassioned path *can* be easy. But, as I was raised, I look at the world around me and count my blessings.
“I want to create a place where authors won’t be treated as I was. Where authors have a voice,” Grrl told me. I knew, by then, the hell she had walked through on her national book tours with huge presses. Edits that changed the race of the characters. Covers that made no sense. Marketing that positioned her as meat, as a sex object, as a minor in big grrl clothes. Her path seemed so right...
...so why is her house teetering toward foreclosure? Why does she struggle to raise her family? Is she *too* generous to the authors? Is she too nice, the way she lets bookstores develop payment plans when they can’t pay? The way she let’s authors blame her when chains won’t pay on time? Why does a *good person* struggle?
Dear God, is it truly because the impassioned path is never easy?
My quickening to life arrived when I found my path. When I realized how much it terrified me. How much outside my “comfort zone” it was. How much I’d be required to give and let go of. How much time, money, effort, sacrifice... I knew it was impassioned because it would minister to the heart. I knew (oh, forgive me, friend!) that it was impassioned because it was going to be *hard.*
A different friend (though, God help her, one in this same circle) wrote to me recently:
“I feel like I really am waking up right now. Finding who I really am. I’ve been praying to find out who I'm supposed to be. I feel everyone is here for a reason. Everyone has a mission. Many people don't search hard enough for their mission and they miss it. My whole life I've been adamant that I won't miss that path, and my prayer for years has been that God would reveal to me what I have to do to find and follow that path. Right now, that is a lot of the revelation I've been receiving. How to become the person I need to be, to be an effective servant for Him in the mission He has placed me on.”
Another friend is riding in the car with his mother when she breaks down, she says, “I just don’t want you to take the hardest path. I want life to be easy for you. Not full of persecution and bigotry and hatred. I want you to be happy.”
And he looks at her. His silence acknowledges that life will be hard ahead of him. And he answers carefully, “What makes you think I’m not happy?”
I can be happy... even when life is a trial in darkness.
I can be happy... even when I don’t see the point in the pain.
I can be happy, not because I am a simple-minded, flowers-and-bird-song, cliché-brained idiot, but because I know inside me, at my core, that I am where I am meant to be.
Those of us who choose to live by what man cannot take away, we spend our early lives searching, actively questing for our path. We are not driven by money or even comfort. We believe that not finding that impassioned path... or worse, finding it and choosing, knowingly, not to walk it... is the only unforgivable sin.
We know that one gift that will be given to us when we walk with Him, is that we will come to see ourselves through the eyes of God -- perfect as we are even with our imperfections. Not to be judged my man or even our own insincerities. We are perfect to be where we are. Doing our work which is His work which is hard.
“Do you fear this time?” I asked Grrl (perhaps she is that mythological “One Grrl in Every Generation”).
Her voice held that smile of hers that I miss so badly since I’ve moved away. “As long as I am doing everything I can, to the best of my ability, in every moment of every day, than I am doing everything He asks of me. And no, I am not afraid.”
And what He asks is never easy but it is always impassioned.
E.J.
