You know those moments. The ones where you laugh so hard you cry. The ones where the air in the room shifts. The ones where you almost pull out your phone to film it.
And thank God you don’t.
This month, I learned that the holiest work, the truest connections, can’t be documented. You just had to be there.
October was supposed to be a month of reading and reflection. Instead, it became a month of doing. The Creative Pilgrimage—my yearlong practice of exploring faith through art, teaching, and service—kept pulling me out of study and into action. By the time I sat down to write, I realized I’d lived the material more than I’d analyzed it. This is the record of that living—the work, the conversations, the mistakes, and the small revelations that rose out of it.
I’d planned to spend the month with Luke’s Gospel, tracing how Jesus keeps showing up in motion and in company—on roadsides, in kitchens, among the anxious and the ordinary. I didn’t expect that to become a field guide for my own life, but it did. Like the disciples on the road, I found myself walking the lesson rather than reading it. Luke’s Jesus moves toward people; that became my pattern, too.
The Cart at the End of the Driveway
It began with the Collective Outcry Starter Kit, a tool I fully launched at the start of October to help people find words for their convictions. I made it out of the same restless mix of faith and alarm that’s followed me since 2016: if I can’t stop the chaos, I can at least help people speak truth clearly. The response was immediate—emails, messages, and in-person conversations from people who had used it or shared it with others. The reach wasn’t abstract; it felt close and personal, like the tool had landed where it was needed.
For No Kings Day, I took a day off from work the day before to build a rough collapsible poster-making cart and planned to roll it to the larger protest. At the last minute the morning of the protest, something in me balked. Instead of going to the protest, I wheeled the cart to the end of my driveway. I was out there for a couple hours, painting and talking with passersby. There was one stretch—maybe half an hour—when my immediate neighbors lingered, and something shifted. Neighbors who hadn’t spoken deeply in years stood together, sharing stories, worries, laughter.
One neighbor, a Haitian immigrant, feared deportation after raising his daughters here and putting them through medical school. Another, from Colombia, wept that her parents wouldn’t be able to come to her wedding. My friend next door, who is on EBT, worried about Thanksgiving. Every person I spoke to that day carried a fear.
Another neighbor came by with her young daughter to make signs, and everything clicked. My prototype cart worked, but it needed space for others to create alongside me. The next version will make room for community, not just output. I’m already sketching it, scavenging materials again. I also need to make sure I have a way for folks to see the Starter kit if they don’t have a phone.
When it was over, I realized what success felt like: peace. Not adrenaline, not pride, not the self-conscious satisfaction of being “useful.” Just peace. Watching people talk and laugh with each other, I didn’t feel like a put-upon short-order cook cranking out clever signs. I felt like someone who had created a space for connection—a small clearing where strangers could breathe together.
Presence and Vocation
That moment reset my thinking. My work as an artist and teacher had always centered on showing people they could make beauty. Now it reminded me that ministry happens face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder. Confronting people’s fear of expression parallels welcoming them into God’s work.
Thomas Merton wrote that vocation is the meeting of two freedoms—ours and God’s. That line haunted me all month. Freedom doesn’t always look like expansion; sometimes it means staying put and making space for others.
Midway through the month, reeling under heavy worries, I had an encounter I assumed would be a safe place to exhale. That didn’t work out—but what it revealed was worth the bruise. I realized that witness is the base unit of God’s love: standing beside someone as they’re buffeted by life, saying little, truly listening, and helping only when asked. Teaching has trained me for that kind of presence for years. That moment showed me I can offer it to others and, when needed, to myself.
I woke up the next day not burning with embarrassment, but with an enormous sense of grace. I remembered what I could do for others and, for once, gave myself that same gift. The lesson landed in real time, gentle and dimensional. Presence is the whole point—the unrecorded, unpostable gift. You just have to be there.
The Workshops
Next, I taught my Holy Ghost, Printed Form workshop—ten students, an etching press that refused to cooperate, and a pasta maker press that saved the day. We talked about the presence of the Spirit in out lives amidst the mess of making, and we all left smudged and glowing. Even the misprints and misunderstandings became lessons in patience. We were joyful simply being there together.
The month ended with my Signs of Praise workshop—six women, tables full of poster board and paint sticks. I rewrote the class to slow things down, to make the act of lettering itself contemplative. To calm people’s fears about big paper, I give them permission to be bad at it: live in the yellow. Start with the lightest color, work out spacing and rhythm, then finish boldly. Mistakes become texture and accent. By the end, we were dancing to Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Go Marching In,” holding up our signs in laughter and pride. I almost filmed it, but thank God I didn’t. The holiness was in the moment, not the documentation.
“Live in the yellow” really helped my students, helping them fast track to a wee bit of grace for themselves. It’s one of my favorite tools for class culture building.
Here is the rough handout I wrote for this–I will be refining it much further, but it is a start!
Lessons from the Work
In my twenties I made signs shoulder to shoulder with strangers, on our way to marches. In my thirties I taught others to make them in carefully constructed settings. In my forties, terrified by the rise of Trump-ism, I took the work online. Now in my fifties, I’m finding where I can be of best use—teaching in person, helping people make something real with their own hands within a short time. The circle has closed without fanfare, but the work feels deeper. It’s not about volume; it’s about presence.
When I moved Go High Signs online, the audience exploded. The numbers were thrilling, the comments affirming, the reach bigger than I ever had before—and yet it was hollow. Performative. Unsustainable. What passed for community was a simulacrum of it, sweet and thin, the saccharine illusion of connection social media sells back to us. Let me be clear–I made friends, went a lot of places, did some great work, but I was left depleted. It looked like impact, but it didn’t feed me or anyone else for the long run. Having to mine the news every day for ideas burned me out to an extreme. I can't live in a reactive space like that, I have to be somewhere growing and kind.
The church world is the opposite: gratitude is genuine, interactions slow and personal, connection real—but the structures to support longterm creative work aren’t quite what they could be. Church communicators and designers are valued for their gifts, yet the system can assume creative labor is cheap or free. That gap isn’t cruelty; it’s confusion. As churches struggle under the weight of needs the state has abandoned, we’re all stretching what little we have to keep serving.
I’m starting to see my future vision come into focus. I get what I need from working face-to-face with people—the teaching, the hands-on creative ministry—and then I can apply all of my professional skills: the branding, the strategy, the coding, the tool-making. I can offer those at a meta-level, maybe serving the national Church and other faith communities, definitely collaborating with makers and thinkers out in the world.
That dual rhythm feels right. The immediate work feeds my soul; the higher-level work builds capacity for others. I’m learning to serve without resentment—to hold the tension between providing for my family and giving myself to God’s work. Stability isn’t greed; it’s stewardship. My harvest has to be large enough for me to give back to my Church in a sustainable way while I raise my family and lead my life.
That’s the balance I carried into the last part of the month—less about proving, more about building. I wanted to see whether I could translate all this reflection on vocation and presence into something concrete, something that would meet real needs in real time.
Tools, Texts, and Grace
Towards the end of the month, I built the SNAP Resource Flyer Generator to help churches respond to the federal shutdown and the suspension of food assistance. Within a moment, a congregation could generate a concise flyer with state resources and food-bank links. The responses came fast—from small-church users who found it simple and clear, and from diocesan communications leaders in places like Chicago and California who praised it as a model. I am really thrilled to hear positive feedback from such a range of folks. That breadth tells me it was usable and good.
I think such digital tools could serve the entire house of faith—that sort of design can be ministry when it helps people care for one another. The work doesn’t need to be grand; it needs to be useful and loving, right here and right now.
It may not shock you to hear that I didn’t finish everything I meant to read this month. I read Luke several times but only managed to read parts of the Merton and Wiman texts. What I did read stayed with me. Merton reminded me that vocation is a dialogue, not a decree—a meeting of two freedoms that keeps unfolding. Wiman taught me that grace has a strange sense of direction; it moves backward as well as forward, transforming what came before. And Luke kept bringing me back to the table—to the places where people meet, eat, talk, and try again.
Together, they offered a map: Merton gave me a theology of vocation, Wiman a theology of grace, Luke a theology of presence.
The Ongoing Pilgrimage
I always knew this pilgrimage wouldn’t be about checking off books or making perfect essays. I feel a momentum building—a chance to experience grace in real time with all my facets engaged, even when things get messy or half-finished. Maybe especially then. I can give myself that grace—the same grace I’ve been trying to teach others to claim.
Faith doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in action.You just have to be there.
As I turn to the flow of November, the theme is Christ the King: Power and Servanthood.
I’ll be reading the Book of Hebrews. I will also read from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue, and This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley.
These will carry the conversation forward—how beauty, embodiment, and power intersect when faith calls us to serve rather than to shine.
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