I feel that it’s important to remember how memories and past experiences shape who we are. That is the purpose of this exercise. In that vein, I would like to thrust us all into the present. Who are you now? What are you now? Where are you going? And why are you here?
I’m exhausted. I’m sun burnt. My feet hurt. But when I wake up in the brisk mountain breeze at 7:00 in the morning, I can’t help but feel refreshed. In August, I start a job with the Boy Scouts of America in the Big Bend region of west Texas, and until then, I’m working at the camp I’ve been working at the past couple summers. My job at camp is meant as training for my job in August.
Even so, I am terrified.
I am terrified of jumping headfirst into a job without being prepared. I hate “baptism by fire,” being thrust into a duty without the proper training to do it. My job here at camp is full of duties and responsibilities I’ve never had and haven’t been trained for. I’m terrified of working here at camp, and that doesn’t even approach the level of terror I am feeling for my career as a District Executive.
My terror is fueled by my fear of failure in my new career. That, and I have already left my home and my family without knowing when I’ll be back, and Alpine is not a cultural center of diversity and commerce like Houston, and I’ll be apart from Kristen for unknown intervals of time, and I’m facing the onslaught of new added responsibilities like feeding myself and sheltering myself.
Many areas of my life are soon approaching a critical junction. I have stated that I am scared of a job where I haven’t had training. I am dreadfully frightened of “baptism by fire.” But now, I’m realizing, my life is a job where I haven’t had the proper training. I don’t know how to hold a long-term career, I don’t know how to feed or shelter myself, and I don’t know how to maintain relationships with my family and my girlfriend from thousands of miles away.
Every facet, every crook, every turn of my entire life in two months will be an inferno. I will be baptized, through fire, into my existence. I’ll miss rent, I won’t meet quotas, I’ll eat fast food late at night, and my family and loved ones will miss me, as I will miss them. The failures will come like blisters and scars in the blaze of experience. But those imperfections will be smoothed out like leather over my skin and I will grow to be stronger through my baptism. I will repent of my failures, and through them, I will be cleansed to a whiter, purer form of myself.
An older “me” will die, to make way for a newer “me.” Toughened by the fires of the forge of being, hammered and shaped into a sharper and more efficient “me.”
