Attachment

Yesterday afternoon I had coffee with a student from the New Life School of Worship, a program based out of my church that trains people how to biblically, and lovingly lead others in worship of their God.  It's a program I have directed for the last 18 months.  As we talked about his new job at a church in Pennsylvania, and his impending move away from Colorado, something started to feel strange in my heart.  I began to experience a certain heaviness, a sense that a piece of my life was leaving, or at least that somehow something wasn't right.

Later I discovered the truth, having analyzed the complex amalgam of emotion; I realized it boiled down to sadness.

It seemed just yesterday I was talking in my office with this young guy and his Mom, trying to help him decide if the NLSW was even the place for him to come and spend a year of his life.  Now, having come, he is preparing to leave - to another fresh start, a place of service.  He is going off to do "in real life" what he spent a year learning to do here.  It's a success for him, and for the program!  We accomplished what we hoped to do; he experienced what I hoped he would.  Now he's got a date of departure.  And that's SAD!

I've been thinking about my position over the last few weeks and months, and observing the true oddness of it.  From a pastoral point of view, it's a unique and surprisingly taxing situation.  It's as if I pastor a congregation of 60 people that I handpick, invest my life into, and send away every 9 months having already begun the process again with a new batch of hopefuls.  Then I take 3 months off and bask in the Colorado sunshine (no, not exactly) only to begin the process again the next fall.

Weird.

And he's not the only one.  This year we've been blessed to have a truly stellar group of 1st and 2nd year students.  They come from all walks of life, with generational differences and various goals for this next season.  But as I watch them leave, something is clicking in me in a way it hasn't in years past (sorry previous NLSW classes!).  I'm attached.  And weird though it may be, it's something I think I should begin to get used to - with a baby girl on the way.  Parenthood.  Aside from a killer show on NBC, it's something that I'm realizing will slowly take away pieces of me - and this before my first child is even born!

To say I see this year of graduates as my children would be both incomplete and impossible.  Many of them are my elders, and I eclipse the youngest by 10 years at most!  But certainly, this year has helped me understand a wonderful part of life - in parenting and otherwise.  Despite the discomfort and unnatural feeling of their immanent departure, I'm experiencing a taste of what it means to have invested myself in something and see the dividend going to another cause.  Someone else will be the beneficiary.

Sheesh it's weird.  And actually it does feel quite right somehow.

Students - just promise to call every so often!