Mixed Up

I am sparing you a scene of the carnage. We were awakened Sunday night at almost midnight by a deafening crash. John and I bolted out of bed and ran for the boys' room. They were fine, but startled out of sleep and bewildered too. It had sounded like a car crash. In our house.

John called to me that the shelf over my craft desk had fallen, pulled its bolts right out of the wall. I settled the kids and stepped down the hall. Broken glass, silk flwers, paper, shattered decorations covering the top of my desk and in a wide swath across the floor. Foam letter stamps, ribbon, jumbled and mingled with shards of my storage jars. We went back to bed.

Yesterday as I cleaned up the glass and shoveled materials that could not be saved into the garbage, I looked at my piles of paper and idea books and albums. And felt tired from more than just the missed sleep.

I am a scrapbooker. Or I was. Then I picked up my first digital camera, and learning and making mistakes and doing retakes did not have the price tag of processing rolls of film. I became a photographer, graduating to a digital SLR, deciphering Understanding Exposure, taking on portrait clients and buying lenses. Then moving into art photography, making my own greeting cards and selling them. Continuing in that pursuit, always seeking to see, record, illumine.

I loved to scrapbook, and I still love the idea of my words and our memories and images put together and here for us, and later, for the boys and their boys. But I am also a photographer, and by turns a poet and writer, a cook and baker, a shoestring home decorator and a voracious reader.

Those are a lot of passions to fit into the moments a day when I am not mommying and doing the basic home stuff and spending time with John. And I am a bit of an all or nothing person. It is hard for me to accept that I can't do it all, learn it all, be it all at once. That there is nothing wrong with shifting gears from one passion to another as whimsy strikes.

I guess the fear that I won't "accomplish" anything is what underlies my conern. That if I would only apply myself there is a photography career, a book, a published poem waiting to come out of my lens or pen. Is that ego? Or something else?

How do you handle your various interests? When and how do you decide to do something just for you? And the biggie, how do you discern calling within your passions, how do you know when God is speaking a ministry for you within the activities you love?