Growth on the Journey

I feel a bit like Dorothy as she prepared for her return from Oz - "There's no place like home! There's no place like home" - Except my 'ruby slipper' was actually an Amtrak train. What a delightful experience train travel is - I have traveled by train since I was a child, and feel it is highly undervalued for the amazing means of transportation that it is.

But this is not about trains - or even Oz... though Seattle has been known as the Emerald City. This is about the willingness to be a life-long learner. Perhaps it is the process of aging, or wising up - or just the normal way of things, but I am finding that there is always more to learn, more to understand, more expansion of horizons that needs to happen in my life.

I am never so "there" that I couldn't use a bit more input to enhance my experience of life. In fact, the more I teach, the more I become aware of how much I have to learn. This thing called life involves an incredible amount of stretching!

The late Dr. David Walker gave a talk once wherein he said that you really can't ever honestly say "This is as good as it gets," because the Universe is infinite in Its capacity to provide. So, no matter how good it is, there is always room for it to be better.

I arrived home yesterday from an Ongoing Education Conference geared to Ministers. Twenty five of us gathered for the better part of a week with four stalwart guides to help us expand upon our ministries. We had to open up and share and allow ourselves to be opened to greater ideas of ourselves and our spiritual communities.

The beautiful part was our willingness to be vulnerable with one another, and our instructors modeled that humility for us beautifully. No one has ever grown into leadership without some stumbling points along the way, and our teachers were truly humble in sharing their own experiences with us.

Where does all this go? All I can say with any degree of surety is that I find my role in the coming years is more of receptive student. Even as I teach, I am learning what I need to learn to teach what is coming before me. And that excites me.