It'll be Alright.

Photo by Jorge Poveta via 500px.

A conversation I’d had with a friend of mine got me thinking the other day.  In the current situation I’m in, I’m the ‘head’ of Communications at YWAM San Francisco.  The funny thing about this position is, YWAM San Francisco, up until this point hasn’t ever had a ‘Communications’ department.  From what I can tell, they’ve always had people acting in the areas of communications aspects.  Obviously, people have been responsible for answering phones, emails, etc.  But until now, there hasn’t been a formal ‘department’ dedicated intentionally to good communication within and without the base.  I’m now that role.  

All my life, the main gift I’ve used has been in design.  Throughout the last six or seven years of my life, I’ve thought design, I’ve developed design, I’ve searched design, and created design.  It wasn’t until recently that I discovered the correlation between the season I’m in and what I’ve done for the last six or so years.  I’ve realized that because of this shift, I’ve come to a point of having a minor identity crisis.  Now, I don’t mean identity crisis in the large most frequently heard way, but in a processing, smaller way.  

Doing graphic design for so long, using the same programs, preforming the same tasks, it came to the point where I’d do something very quickly that would take others quite a long time.  Coming into a role of Communications, I never realized how different it is.  

With design, I would work on something quickly, see it the whole time I’m working on it, finish, receive some sort of praise usually, and then see the completed piece in either print or web format.

With communications, I get started on something that seems like it should be done, I think about it for a while, I try to implement it, perhaps fail, get back to it, establish it partially, perhaps spread its use, but then it’s just there; and it’s almost always the implementation of engine that other people created, so I don’t feel like I made something.  And that’s only one aspect of it.  

In one frame, I end up with a finished physical product that I can see, grasp, and in the other, I end up with a created system that isn’t ever actually seen, makes things easier for people, but you almost only ever hear about it if there’s a mistake.  It’s been a hard adjustment getting into this other realm.  And it’s really only the other day that I realized more fully that I was in a different situation, and the gravity of it.  It hasn’t been the best time.  It’s most certainly a stretching experience though.  I’m realizing along with it an aspect of life in suffering.  I’ve never felt so strongly such a sense of suffering for my cause.  In the dark of not knowing exactly my full role, in a place where other people aren’t sure what I do, not being able to implement everything I see in my mind’s eye, being in the midst of an incomplete dream.  

I can say this: The stretching time is hard, but it’s full, meaningful, raw life in its real form.  Not steeped in distention from God as some situations where others experience raw life, but full of life in Christ, life in the Creator, and endlessly worth it.