Thursday, February 24, 2011

Leaving the Comforts of Home Is Not Easy but Important

Welcome back. You belong here.

I'm blogging through the process of leaving the institutional structure for my passions and ideals.

My passion and ideal is to bring small businesses, neighborhoods and community organizations together to help those in need by developing a deep sense of community, ownership and generosity.

For more on what we're doing in neighborhoods see here, here and here.

Leaving the comforts of home is never easy and it's specially not easy when you have a family, an amazing wife and three radically beautiful children. But it's the right thing to do.

I find myself having to deal with a lot of practical questions both inside and out: "what will you do now", "what are your marketable skills", "have you found a job yet". I ask myself those things all the time but I'm trying not to live there.

Instead my focus is to think, to consider and reflect not on the possibilities or best (or worst) career move, but on the greatest place of sacrifice, generosity and joy. In other words on my ideals.

Can we be idealists in this day and age when money is tight, jobs are scarce and unemployment is high? Yes you can. It is the ideals that give shape to what really matters - giving hope to others, sacrifice, love, to be a great husband, an amazing father and to live deeply.

Some call us artists or dreamers, Peter Block calls us social architects, community developers, neighborhood revitalizers. It's all part of the same make up of people called to change the world. I want to change the world and to do it together with my wife, children and a band of brothers. I want to make a difference in the world and right now leaving the comforts of home, a steady salary, a successful production manager career together with the book and cell phone benefits is the next step.

Am I concerned about health insurance, retirement, a college fund and money to pay rent? Of course I am, and life seems to constantly pressure you towards those worries.

But for now, in this liminal space, this in between jobs, I'm holding on to my ideals, those God given passions inside of me that will never go away.

That's what living is all about.
The rest will come by faith.

Have a great day.

Into the future,

davidTrig