almost over!

I’m sitting in my office, the office I’ve inhabited for 40 hours a week for the past two and a half years. I’ve gone through my drawers, recycled about a forest worth of paper and shredded about a meadow. I’ve sat in this chair and listened to the stories of survivors of indescribable pain. I’ve helped people get money, helped them get protection, and I’ve told them there’s nothing I can do. It’s an intense job, full of ups and downs, of never knowing if you’ve done enough, never knowing if the person who walks out of your office will be alive tomorrow. I guess in some ways that’s always true. You never know what will happen to people, I guess the chances of someone walking out of my office and being killed are just higher than with other jobs. I’ve been lucky to not have a client killed in my interim here. It’s something that I try to pretend doesn’t happen. That sure these people get stalked, beat up, raped, screamed at, and almost killed, but they don’t ever get killed. I thank God each day I wake up and there isn’t a fatality. It’s hard work, but it’s important work. We live in a society that is filled with an attitude of entitlement, where women are still second class citizens in a lot of ways. It needs to change and there are people all over the world trying to make those changes. To impact their corner of the world in a positive way. I’m a little overwhelmed as I tie up my loose ends and prepare to leave this life. It’s all I’ve known for three years and it will be a huge change of every part of my life after I move. I’m sad to leave, but I know it’s time to go. I was home at the right time, able to help my family through my dad’s illness, able to be supported by my church family and my fantastic friends, but it’s time to go. The constant trauma work is getting to me, has been for quite a while but I was able to just push it all away for a long time. Now I know that I need to be done. I’ve been contemplating what I’m going to do for money while I’m at seminary and there’s a domestic violence center there that I’ve thought about working for, but I look at my life and how impacted I’ve become and I know that I cannot do this kind of work for a while. I may return someday, and I know that it would be worthwhile and fulfilling, but it’s just not time now. I need a break, a job where the worst outcome isn’t death. I’m off to a party for work and then I have Monday off. Wahoo! My last day at the office is the 22^nd, I can’t believe that it’s almost here.

“Take the truth wherever you find it, including the past, and move forward bravely, and keep in mind that God loves you” Garrison Keillor