Presidential Ponderings: 10-16
In 2022, I lost both of my patriarchs: my father and my ex-husband.
It is a terrifying freedom.
Because without a man to claim responsibility for me in the communities i have spent my career within, i am working at a major disadvantage.
I have the chops to do the job of launching the GoMurphCenter. I also have the bona fides.
But most of my professional life after I left teaching high school was spent working for friends of my dad. And my dad worked in the conservative Christian community, which is not an easy place to make a living as a divorced, fat, queer, forthright Jewish woman who has been out of the workforce for 15 years.
When crafting the strategic model for building this organization, i did some very intentional thinking about what assets i could leverage in this new world that exists without El Gordo and his patronage.
I got to a place of deep peace that posthumously calling in favors owed to my dad was a dubious strategy and decided not to put a lot of energy into it.
But I have to admit that I was shook that the church where he was a good and faithful servant for decades declined to help me spread the word about the November art show dedicated to El Gordo’s memory. I honestly thought the folks there who loved him would appreciate the head’s up because I know the email list off his computer was incomplete and not everyone is on Facebook.
A guy I worked with at World Vision used to describe that shook feeling as being “knocked off your square.” When I realized my nervous system wasn’t balanced, I got quiet. I left the email unanswered in my box and made some tea and toast. I prayed. I felt myself vibrating and adjusted my calendar so I didn’t lash out at others while feeling my feelings. I wrote a lot of unpublishable paragraphs fully intending to publish them but also knowing I would stick to my personal code and sleep on it before hitting send.
Reader, although i was no longer vibrating in the morning, that “essay” still seemed basically legit.
Reader, it was not.
Thankfully, Providence gave me Amy Williams as my consultant because she was very brave and found a way to convince me to start over with this newsletter. She gently pointed out that although I had adjusted my intellectual expectations about how far El Gordo’s good-will might carry the GoMurphCenter, this particular rejection went straight past my head and directly to my heart. The church that baptized me does not want to partner with me.
And that’s Ok.
I’m still El Gordo’s "beautiful princess daughter" and the GoMurphCenter never needed FirstPresGE to succeed.
The Gordon E Murphy Center for Change Studies is a framework upon which to gather a community of folks with a desire to help burnt-out community leaders. These folks will necessarily trust me as an intelligent, passionate, transparent, prophetic, and humble matriarch, whether or not they knew and respected my dad.
We will grow at God’s pace with our squares firmly supporting our spiritual stance. Word of mouth and the movement of the Spirit will do better marketing than an announcement in Tidings or a share on Facebook ever will.
I am grateful that you have been willing to read my newsletters until you know for sure that the GoMurphCenter is the right place for you to participate. Or even just that the process of building it is interesting.
I look forward to welcoming the people that come out to Yorktown Mall in the month of November to experience my art exhibit and hang out with me and the other volunteers. There are still shifts available if you want to be a helper and I can reconfigure the daily schedule on any unclaimed day to make it work with yours if you want to donate some time to give us a chance to keep growing.
Sincerely,
Rebecca