This is the fourth and final post in my Living in the And series.
In the first post, I wrote about the weight of holding two callings at once. The arithmetic that never quite worked. The mornings I kept redesigning that never actually held. In the second, I wrote about what the “and” produces, about a June workshop where twenty five years of nonprofit leadership and everything I have built through Mission ENSPIRE met in one room and made something neither one could have made alone. In the third, I wrote about how uneven that “and” actually is, and how I am learning that uneven does not mean unequal, that a slower season is information and not a verdict.
Four posts is longer than I usually stay with one idea. This one would not let me go until I had said the whole thing, and I think that is because I was not only writing about the “and” this summer. I was living inside it while I wrote.
So here is where all of it has brought me, and where I want to leave you before I close this series.
What I Know Now That I Did Not Know in June
I started this series thinking I needed to explain myself. To account for the hours that do not divide evenly between my full-time work and Mission ENSPIRE, to justify why one calling gets Saturday afternoons and stolen evenings while the other gets a whole calendar built around it. Somewhere underneath that instinct was a fear that if I could not make the math work, I had no business calling both of them real.
What I know now is that the math was never going to work, and it was never supposed to. Both callings are real. Neither one is the thing I am doing while I wait to do the other thing. And wholeness, the word I used back in post two, does not mean equal. It means I get to stop treating the quieter calling as evidence against myself, and start treating the unevenness as the actual shape of this season instead of a problem I still have not solved.
I also learned something about returning, the thing I wrote about in the very first post. Consistency, at least in this season, was never going to look like rhythm for me. It looks like coming back to Mission ENSPIRE again and again, in whatever hour I can find, without needing that hour to resemble anyone else’s business hours. That is the truest thing this series taught me. I did not arrive at it by figuring something out. I arrived at it by staying honest long enough, post after post, to let it become true.
One Thing Is Necessary
There is a passage in the Gospel of Luke I have found myself returning to more than once this summer. Martha is doing what needs to be done in the kitchen while her sister Mary sits and listens, and Martha finally says what so many of us have felt, tell her to help me. Jesus does not tell Martha that her work does not matter. He tells her she is anxious about many things, and only one thing is necessary.
I used to read that story as a lesson about priorities, choose the better thing over the lesser one. I read it differently now. I think it might be a lesson about seasons. Not every good thing gets to be the one thing at the same time. Some of what matters to you is allowed to wait its turn without becoming less true while it waits.
That is the practical piece underneath everything I have written in this series. If your “and” is uneven right now, the question is not which calling deserves more of you. The question is what this particular season is actually asking you to give your full attention to, and whether you can let the rest of what matters stay real without demanding equal time to prove it.
Maybe your “and” does not look like mine. Maybe it is a job and a marriage that both need you fully present. Maybe it is a caregiving season and a dream you have not put down. Whatever your version looks like, the season itself usually already knows which one needs your full attention right now. The work is trusting that knowing, instead of arguing with it.
What I Am Protecting This Season
For me, right now, that one thing is a self-paced course built out of something I did not expect, talks I have already given.
Since last July, I have shown up again and again in virtual rooms, speaker showcases, summits, sessions, and spoken about worth, confidence, boundaries, courage, more times than I expected to when I started. Somewhere in the middle of this season, I went back through those recordings and realized the teaching I needed to build was already there. What it needed was structure, sequencing, a way to guide a woman all the way through it on her own.
So, I built it that way. I recorded a new opening to welcome you in and a new closing to help you leave with something to carry, and everything in between draws on talks I have given since July, to women I never met in person but still watched recognize themselves in real time, in a chat window, in a room I could not see but could feel. Five lessons, moving from reclaiming your own story to building a rooted kind of confidence, to protecting your energy without guilt, to naming the perfectionism that keeps capable women stuck, and ending with something simple and repeatable to carry forward.
That is part of why I am proud of it in a way that surprises me a little. It is not a course I built from nothing under a deadline. It is a course made of everything I said out loud this year, every virtual room I showed up to and told the truth in. Both callings built it, honestly. The years in leadership taught me what a woman actually needs to hear to move. Mission ENSPIRE gave me the rooms, virtual as they were, to say it in.
It is not ready to sell yet. There are still pieces standing between what exists and you being able to walk through it, and I am not going to rush past that just because I am proud of it. But I wanted you to know it exists, that it is real, that it is the one thing I am protecting on my calendar for the rest of this year, and that when it is ready, you will be some of the first to hear its name.
I did not set out four posts ago to find a system. I do not think I even believed one existed. What I was looking for, without fully naming it, was permission to stop treating the unevenness as a problem I still had not solved.
What I have instead is something I trust more than a system. The “and” does not get lighter because you finally understand it. It gets sustainable when you stop requiring it to be even, choose the one thing this season is actually asking of you, and trust that everything else you carry is not gone just because it is waiting.
That is the whole series, really. Not a formula for holding two callings well. Just permission, the kind you give yourself, to hold them honestly, protect what this season can actually carry, and trust the returning.
What is the one thing you are choosing to protect this season, and what are you letting wait without deciding it matters less?