Soundtrack for Emotionally Dysfunctional Griever Wanted

I've always thought that life would be much easier to navigate if it came accompanied by a soundtrack that helped you to know when the big moments were occurring. The music gets louder or more intense or more dramatic and you know to perk up, pay attention, dial in.

Without the soundtrack, it seems so easy to miss the really important stuff. You look back and realize that the moments that most mattered are delighted in more in retrospect than in real-time.

So I'm in my last week of normal campus work. And one of my (many, I'm sure) emotional dysfunctions is that I'm a post-dated griever. In other words, the enormity of my change in work for next fall will hit me sometime in July.

Recognizing this, I'm wanting to be fully present to things this week.

This is my last week of doing what I've done for the past fourteen years: meeting just about every day with students to sort through personal issues, ask big questions about faith and life, point out patterns of sin and brokenness in their lives, celebrate the great things God is doing in and around them, and generally wade into the every-day-ness of their lives looking for how God's at work in them.

It's a great gig. Some days I'll literally have six or seven back-to-back-to-back conversations that run at levels of honesty and transparency and depth of spiritual longings and struggles that some people will never have their entire lives.

But I'm done at the end of this year. And it' s a good thing that I'm moving to--focusing on developing and leading staff across several campuses rather than students at one campus.

But I'm trying to grow up a little bit, trying to figure out how to soak in these last moments on campus rather than realize months from now how much I'll miss the place.

But I don't know how to do that without it feeling forced. Everything seems to collapse into cliche: count my blessings, smell the roses, stop drop and roll. Okay, not that last one, but everything else is what comes to mind. I don't want to try to drum up emotion or invent it, but I do want to feel what there is to feel when it's happening in real-time, not two months delayed.

So I'm not sure what all that means. I'm just praying that this last week on campus will be full of God's grace to help me to enjoy the right moments and to grieve what I'll miss about the place, the people and this specific work.

It would just all be much easier to do if I had that soundtrack.