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My life is far from boring. Sometimes it’s filled with heavy tasks, but what I love about holding margin is that when my friend Jenny texts me on a Saturday night if I’m free to hang out, we can spontaneously get tickets to the theatre showing of The Importance of Being Ernest before catching the last set of her husband’s ska band at a bar in town.

I’m still working to balance the heavy stuff with the whimsy, but I did have a Toy Story bandaid on my arm when Jenny picked me up. And then I basically laughed non-stop through the play. I can’t tell you if it was the best production of Oscar Wilde’s work, but I can tell you that I loved the experience start to finish, and that includes the fact that Jenny was up for it on a moment’s notice.

I’ve missed a lot of things because I was focused on what’s next or sometimes even dwelling on the past. Saturday night, I was fully locked in for the show and hanging out with my friend. In the weeks of committing to hold tightly to the work boundaries to not let my Easter Camp task list overflow into every area of my life, I’ve found an uncommonly high number of people just want one more detail from me. It’s thirty seconds here, three minutes there, a pause for a moment that ends up being half an hour.

The real miracle to me in this is that I’m still on track. I’m not ahead like I like to be, but I’ve been able to see my other key leaders step up and do some amazing things – and that while some other people have dropped things that became my responsibility to pick up. Because I’ve seen people over tasks, and my ministry is individuals over programme, I’m way more present for each bit of what I’m doing. I’m also learning to consider myself as a whole person who needs the same kind of care that I’d want to provide for each of my leaders and youth. What a wild shift.

It’s led to me being more present. Yes, feeling some deeper hurts in the moments that are hard, but also being present to more joy in the spontaneous whimsy that I’ve preserved margin for. I have to live what I believe, and I was so struck in one of my present moments as I caught up with a youth leader this week. He’s in a discipleship group I lead, and last week we talked about how Jesus calls us each into something based on our gifting and I left a career behind to follow Jesus into a better kind of calling with those gifts. Jesus called fishermen to be fishers of men, but I don’t fish, so what did he call me to? Quinn handed me this gift in the coffee shop and said he immediately thought of me because I don’t fish, but I am called in my gifting as a teacher and I left behind a classroom to keep doing this Jesus type of teaching.

I love my job.