Spirit Was Already There

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with building something new.

Not the loneliness of isolation, though that is real too. This is the loneliness of looking around for a map and realizing there isn't one. Of asking people who love you what they think and watching them go quiet in a way that tells you they don't quite have the language for what you're describing. Of googling things at midnight that don't have good search results because what you're doing doesn't have a category yet.

If you are a religious professional building something outside the institution, or alongside it, or in the space the institution left empty when it failed to show up, you probably know this loneliness. You may have mistaken it for a sign that you are doing something wrong.

I want to offer you a different reading.

There is a story about a woman named Hagar who finds Spirit not in the household but in the wilderness she was cast into. I will be preaching it next week. But the part I cannot stop thinking about is this: Spirit showed up after. In the wilderness. Not before.

I have been thinking about Hagar a lot lately.

Not because I was cast out, exactly. But because I am building things in a landscape that was not designed for what I am building. The institutions I was trained in did not prepare me for this. The manuals don't cover it. The colleagues who could advise me are mostly figuring it out too. And there are days when the absence of a map feels like a sign that I have wandered somewhere I was not supposed to go.

But here is what I keep coming back to: Hagar did not find Spirit in the household. She found Spirit in the wilderness. The place with no map. The place she ended up because the household made a decision about her life that she had no power to refuse.

The wilderness is not where the call ends. It may be where it begins.

I think about the religious professionals I know who are building things right now. Spiritual direction practices. Grief ministries. Ritual offerings. Consulting work. Newsletters. Communities that don't fit neatly inside a congregation or a denomination or a job description anyone has written yet. Most of them feel, at least some of the time, like they are lost. Like the fact that there is no precedent means there is no permission. Like the loneliness of building without a map is a message from Spirit that they should turn around and go back.

What if it isn't?

What if the wilderness is not a detour from the call but the terrain of it? What if the absence of a map is not a sign that you are in the wrong place but that you are in a place that has not been named yet, and naming it is part of the work?

Hagar did not have a map either. She had a skin of water that ran out and a child she could not watch die and Spirit who showed up anyway, in the exact place the household said was not worth going.

The thing you are building does not have to look like what came before it. It does not have to fit the categories. It does not have to make sense to people who have never been in this particular wilderness.

It just has to be the thing Spirit is asking you to build, in the place you actually are, with the water you actually have.

You are not lost. You are early.

And Spirit will already be there before you arrive.

If this landed for you, share it with someone else who is building something in the wilderness. And if you find yourself coming back to The After looking for more of this, that is what a paid subscription is for. I am a writer and a minister and I make my living doing this work. Your subscription is what makes it possible for me to keep showing up here.