Associate Minister Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig

A long time ago, when I was a little girl in third grade, my favorite teacher in the whole world told me, "Never forget: you can be anything you want to be!" Magical words that took root in my heart: I can be anything I want to be! What a rich promise, an invitation to dream and wonder: What will I be? What do I want to be? As a child, I worked hard to live up to other people's expectations - to be right, to be good, to give people no excuses for criticism or, God forbid, disapproval! But those magic words - you can be anything you want to be! - helped my imagination take flight and dream about what I wanted. These words helped me to be curious, to dare and to risk failure and disapproval for the sake of what my spirit longed for.

(P.S. How's this for synchronicity? Just after I wrote this, Mary Katherine let me know Fred Small's song Everything Possible was part of last weekend's worship: You can be anybody you want to be,/You can love whomever you will/You can travel any country where your heart leads/And know I will love you still. Wow.)

Does it still ring true? Can I really be anything I want to be? Well, the years since then have taught me, certainly, that there are many things I will never do well, at least not well enough to make a living at and win the acclaim of the world. I will never play the piano as well as I wish I could. I don't think I will ever be the one to harness nuclear fusion or cure cancer, as my 16-year-old self dreamed. The list goes on. And yet ... what I am doing, I love. I am blessed with this work of ministry, which I love and which also enables me to make a living. There's a great gift in settling into a path of deepening and focus. The thing I am, I want to be. That is pretty amazing.

But that's not all.

Oddly, in this time of transition in our congregation, I find I am rediscovering a hunger to try new things, or to pick up old things I used to love. It's funny, but I really do think it's connected to all the changes coming to UUCF. It's like, everything's changing and shaking up ... so why should I be stuck as the same old, familiar me? I feel an urge to bring some freshness into my life - to dare to try something I'm not sure I'll be good at, just because it sounds fun, inviting, playful. Something I want to do, just because. Yesterday I found myself sitting down at the piano and futzing around with some pieces I played as a kid. I'm still not very good but that's okay. It was just for me, nobody else. This summer John and I are thinking about going camping for the first time in years -  even though I am a wee bit cranky about sleeping on the ground -  because seeing the stars and breathing the outdoor air sounds really good. Even if I don't know the first thing about camping, I'm willing to learn. I think. ...

We can be anything we want to be as long as we remember we don't have to be excellent at it or even any good at all. We just need that hunger to try, just for ourselves, just for our spirits that long for something fresh and new.

I want to close with a poem by the wonderful Irish mystic John O'Donohue. Given to me as a gift, I offer it to you too: