Via the revgals --
1. Share a moment/ time of real encouragement in your journey of faith.
How about all the support I've been getting from all of you, as I've wrestled my way along this year? That has meant a lot.
2. Do you have a current vision / dream for your work/ family/ministry?
Somehow I don't think my work/ministry will be bound to one place and role. I have been called "border crosser" and that resonates...I can imagine "border crossing" in three general ways: being a biblical scholar, pastoring with (notice the preposition) a liberationist base community model church, and traveling with groups to different places in the world for theological reflection on facets of injustice. Each would inform the other. And they give me ways to express and use all the different gifts and skills I have (not to mention temperaments) rather than being locked into only a few. I think I would be very unhappy stuck in one role.
3.Money is no object and so you will.....
Pay off my seminary loans? Travel (after my medieval Spain class the last two weeks, so I am dying to go visit). Build a completely "green," sustainable, eco-friendly house. Donate to places doing great work like Heifer Project.
4. How do you see your way through the disappointments? What keeps you going?
What keeps me going is doxology, and the faith that God didn't bring me this far for nothing.
5. How important are your roots?
My mom has being doing genealogy since I was a child. I have loved learning from her about not only our American roots but going back across the Atlantic as well. She has uncovered stories and ancestors which I find fascinating. I was born in a county in SE Arkansas which my father's ancestors founded...I have visited tiny cemeteries in the middle of cornfields in Illinois where my mother's "great-greats" are buried. In my family there are Union and Confederate soldiers, someone who fought in the Indian Wars with Abe Lincoln, women who passed on gifts and stories, people who testified (for and against) in the Salem witch trials, Mayflower passengers, kings and queens of England and Scotland, survivors of the 100 Years' War, a Visigoth ruler fighting the Moors in Northern Spain in the 9th century, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda...
My roots are quite present to me (obviously). The stories inform me in the sense of both wanting to live in to the best of my history, and to atone for the sins of my ancestors.
6. Bonus= what would you like to add ?
Here's a very tight-focused looking forward: two more weeks of school, and it's vacation time! Woohoo!!! I can do it!!
