Orienting someone to replace you in the job world is kind of like taking a college final—you are expected, either in verbal or written format, to vomit forth all the accumulated knowledge from your job so that you can forget it all when you leave. This is what Noelle and I have been doing since we returned from the Leadership Event.

Yes, it is as mind-numbing as it sounds, I’m sure. I sit for hours and talk about the polity of the PC(USA), the World Tour, the Coordinating Committee, etc., and she has to take it all in. And although I have several colorful charts about PC(USA) polity (if you’re on CoCo, you know what I’m talking about), most of this consists of me just going over papers and talking non-stop about my job.

But perhaps I haven’t passed on what is most important. Take, for instance, the World Tour. I’ve told Noelle all the logistical stuff, explained the different types of presentations you need to have in your toolkit, waxed eloquent on the merits and drawbacks of hotel vs. houseguest vs. dorm room floor for accommodations. But I didn’t tell her about meeting Reynaldo from Nicaragua at 4 am in North Carolina, the time my presentation on medieval Christian mystics and 17th century witchcraft trials had been billed at Brown in Rhode Island as a lecture on Wiccans (which they were really excited for when I showed up), or my encounter with the bison in the Little Red Clown Car on the prairie of Missouri. My eight World Tours gave me a lifetime of stories as I met new people, experienced different regional cultures, worshipped God in a variety of settings, and simply fended for myself in a totally different world than I had grown up with.

In reflecting back on my work for the past three years, I really can’t give Noelle what I value most—the experiences. No other place has given me as many opportunities to encounter God in a variety of unexpected places, whether that was in the exuberant contemporary worship at Presbyterian Youth Triennium or in the deep meditation of a lectio divina Bible study. From the high deserts of northern New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keefe painted at the PC(USA)’s Ghost Ranch, to a Jerusalem hotel room where we huddled together after hearing of violence in Gaza, I have seen Jesus in this church. I have seen the Holy Spirit alive and well, bringing about healing and love where it seems that only darkness and alienation will prevail.

And of course, I have encountered God most of all through the women I’ve met in this Network—women of compassion, love, passion, integrity, and commitment. You have taught me most of all how to express Christ’s love more fully in my own life.

I can’t transmit these experiences on to Noelle. Only God will do that.

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” –Isaiah 58:6

Kelsey