The Place You Are Called To

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deepest hunger meet." —Frederick Buechner

To be honest, I have struggled since the diagnosis between deep love, grateful joy, and paralysing sadness. There will be times driving home from work that I realize I need to cry but there is no time or room for crying. But then counterintuitively, I find that I can laugh with a new joy and gratitude that hadn't come as readily before. It can be a comment from a colleague, one of Jim's jokes, or even a simple observation that sets me off laughing. And love seems to burn in my chest like wood in a wood stove. At times I can feel love's heat so physically inside me that I question if perhaps it is really a heart attack in the making.

At first, in January, all of my hopes for the future and all of my work lost meaning. What has returned has been my knowing of the meaningfulness of my work. My colleagues at Champlain's Emergent Media Center (EMC) have held me up, have given me leeway, and have continued to bring excellence to their work and to our students. The students have reminded me, through their determination and the joy they bring, of the beauty and importance of our work together.

Last week, three events underscored this for me. Each of which brought me to the truth of the quote above.
One event was the testing of the new mobile BREAKAWAY  game with 4th through 7th graders at the Boys and Girls Club in Burlington. They were incredibly engaged in the game and expressed through their loud reactions (called out to no one in particular) their excitement in playing:

“Ooooh! It’s a soccer game!”
"He’s Bad!”
“Bright Orange Hair!”
“This one is obviously going to win...I don’t know what to do.”
“I said, I don’t know.”
“We lost!”
“Watch, I’ll fake this one (game character) out!”
“Why are you copying me? I have pink hair - three of them are copying me - they have pink hair.”
“My team wins! We did it!”
“I love this game!”

Narrative screen from the new BREAKAWAY mobile game in development

Customization screen from the new BREAKAWAY mobile game in development

It was a wonderful way for my students to see how their work will appeal to the youth it is being built for. Upon returning to the EMC, the BREAKAWAY team began implementing on the children' reactions.

BREAKAWAY youth campers in El Salvador

That same day had begun with great news, a paper that I co-wrote with Helen Wang at the University of Buffalo and her PhD candidates Vivian Wu and Ji Hye Echo on the impact of BREAKAWAY at addressing violence against women and girls has been accepted for the MIT Connected Learning Summit. The acknowledgment of the greater community is a measure of one's path but my dream is to spread the message. I hope we can inspire others to employ BREAKAWAY as a tool for change, and to look at the methods that we used to develop it, honoring the creativity of our youth AND employing Sabido style methods, to change the needle on gender based and cultural violence.

Message from one of the BREAKAWAY youth campers in El Salvador

Then lastly and most profoundly, I received an email from a former student who had worked on BREAKAWAY many moons ago. They wrote a deeply personal letter about the struggles they had been facing as a student and after graduation, how what kept coming back to them was "...about my experience and how much I unknowingly took from it" They went on to say how much they have grown and come to find their ground. They ended the note with "I wanted to say thank you for keeping in touch as long as you did. And for all of the positivity and opportunity you brought into my life. I now can truly understand the growth I made while working and learning with you. I regret not being able to keep in touch, but I'm reaching out to say that I truly appreciate you as a teacher and a friend."

Writing that even now brings tears and yet joy. It is true, in whatever language one calls the holy, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deepest hunger meet."

For this I am grateful.

From the BREAKAWAY camp in El Salvador