Did I decide to do something that felt so self-evident? Was it just the path of least resistance? I remember when I began to struggle, when I decided leave the program, that conversation with God. I remember admitting it to myself, the confession the next morning, the meeting with Father Borenson, my advisor.
But was that a decision? Was I giving responsibility to God for an action that I myself took?
These feelings of doubt have been cropping up more and more, recently. I do not doubt in God, but I am beginning to question my relationship with Him. Saying “God knows what is best” is an awfully handy way to absolve oneself from the responsibility for one’s actions.
-I know I’m right to not be in
+I know it’s right for me to not be in ministry. I wouldn’t make a good priest. I wouldn’t be happy, and thus my congregation wouldn’t be happy.
+But I don’t know if my path here, to this point in my life, has what’s required to be called a decision. I wound up in secular life, but I wasn’t thinking what that would entail. All I was picturing is that I would not be Father Kimana.
+Now, here in my thirties, all of the decisions seem so much bigger, even if their impacts are smaller. That’s not to say that pursuing Kay would be a small thing. It has the potential to be huge. It just doesn’t have the change-your-life-in-an-instant quality that leaving Saint John’s did. It would be a process. Admitting feelings, dating, marriage, children…all decisions in and of themselves, all with the potential for failure, incomplete success, or mismatches in expectations.
+I should go home and eat. I love my patients — nerds, to the last — and they always get me thinking, but lately, all this rumination…
+I should go home and eat.