This post is the first in a new series and over the next several posts, I will be writing about what it means to hold more than one calling at the same time. The weight of it, the unexpected gifts of it and what it actually takes to carry both. I hope you will join me for the whole journey.

I have lost count of how many times I have designed the perfect morning.

You probably know the one. Up early, coffee ready, a quiet hour of focused time on Mission ENSPIRE before the workday begins. I have imagined that morning in detail. I have told myself, more than once, that this would be the week I finally put it into practice. And then Tuesday arrives. The early meeting. The message that cannot wait. The morning I designed in my head stays in my head, and the morning I actually live belongs to everything else. By the following Sunday I am designing it all over again, convinced that this time I just need a better system.

Some mornings the time does not go to any work at all. It goes to sleep. It goes to rest, to errands, to being a person with a life and not just a woman with two callings. I used to count those mornings as evidence against myself. I am learning to count them as part of the math.

If you have ever built a routine in good faith and watched it dissolve by midweek, this post is for you.

The Math I Do Not Usually Say Out Loud

Here is what a normal week actually looks like for me. LISC takes the largest share of my working hours by far, and it is demanding work. I lead people who lead people, which means it does not always stay neatly inside the hours assigned to it. It follows me into the evening in the form of things I am still turning over in my mind.

And then there is the rest of a life. Family. Friendships. Rest I actually need. The ordinary maintenance of being a person. None of that disappears to make room for a business, nor should it.

So, Mission ENSPIRE gets what is left, when I can find it. And there is no rhythm to that time right now. I do not have business hours. I do not have a sacred morning block that actually holds. I claim time in chunks, when the energy is there or when something is time sensitive. A Saturday afternoon here. A stolen evening there. A burst of focus when a deadline makes the decision for me.

I am naming this plainly because almost nobody does. Every piece of advice out there says build the routine, protect your mornings, treat your business like a business. I have tried all of it, sincerely and more than once. And what is true for me in this season is that the business gets built in the margins, irregularly, by a woman who coaches other women on consistency and knows exactly how this looks from the outside. I am naming that tension on purpose, because I do not believe I am the only one living inside it.

Not a Job and a Side Hustle

Here is where I need to correct an assumption before it settles in, because it is the assumption people make most often when they hear about my two worlds.

LISC is not the day job that funds the real dream. Mission ENSPIRE is not the passion project waiting for me to escape into it. I have given 19 years to community development work, across Chicagoland, Central Illinois and nationally, and that work is not what I do while I wait to do the thing I love. It is calling. And the coaching, facilitating, and writing I do through Mission ENSPIRE, supporting women to lead themselves well so they can lead everything else well, that is calling too. Same calling, honestly. One purpose, expressed in two places.

I used to think that clarity would make the carrying easier. It does not. In some ways it makes it heavier, and here is why. If one of these were just a job, the math would be simple. You protect the real thing and you endure the other one. You give the job what it requires and not an ounce more, and you pour everything else into the work of your heart. There is a whole library of advice built on exactly that math.

But when both are calling, there is nothing to demote. There is no lesser thing to put down so your arms can be free for the greater thing. The and is not between an obligation and a dream. The and is between two things I would choose again. And the hours still do not divide evenly. That is the weight nobody hands you a framework for.

What the Hours Tell Me

Now here is the part that took me a while to see, and it might be the most important thing in this post.

When I do claim those chunks of time for Mission ENSPIRE, when I finally sit down on that Saturday afternoon or in that stolen evening, I do not feel resentment. I do not feel guilt about what got bumped. I feel good. I feel accomplished. I close the laptop genuinely glad that I took the time to work on the business.

Sit with that for a moment, because there is evidence in it. The hours themselves are never the struggle. Being in the work confirms the calling every single time I get there. The struggle is only ever reaching the hours. Getting to them through the noise and the meetings and the legitimate demands of the other calling.

I think some of us have quietly concluded that because the time is so hard to find, we must be pursuing the wrong thing. That if this were really our calling, the path to it would be clearer and the calendar would cooperate. If that is the conclusion you have been quietly carrying, I want to offer you a different reading. The difficulty of reaching the work is not a verdict on the work. Pay attention to how you feel when you are actually in it. That is where the truth lives, not in how hard it was to arrive.

Returning Is Its Own Kind of Consistency

Earlier this year I wrote about consistency as quiet courage, about showing up before the results arrive. I believed every word when I wrote it, and I believe it now. But this season has taught me something I did not fully understand then.

Consistency does not always look like rhythm. Sometimes it looks like returning.

A rhythm carries you. Once the routine is established, the routine itself does some of the work. You show up because it is 6am and that is what 6am is for. But when there is no rhythm, when the week refuses to repeat itself and the perfect morning keeps dissolving, every single return is a decision. Nobody and nothing carries you back to the work. You carry yourself. You come back to it again on Saturday, again next Wednesday night, again after two weeks when the season swallowed everything. And in some ways that takes more than a routine ever would, because you are choosing the calling fresh every time instead of riding a habit toward it.

So, if your version of consistency looks like returning rather than rhythm right now, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not failing at consistency. You are practicing its hardest form.

There is a song by Jonathan McReynolds called “Make Room.” I have been sitting with the idea at the center of it, the work of making room for what matters most even when your life is already full. That is what this season has asked of me. Not a better system. Not a perfect morning. Just the willingness to keep making room, again and again, for a calling I refuse to set down.

I do not have a tidy resolution for you, and I am not going to pretend that I do. As I write this, the hours still do not divide evenly. The perfect morning still does not hold. What I have instead is the truth of this season, written down plainly and the knowledge that I am not carrying the and alone. Neither are you. There are more of us living in this exact arithmetic than you would ever guess from the outside, building what we are called to build in the margins, returning again and again without a schedule to carry us there.

This series is for us.

What does returning look like in your week right now?