When I was 21, I got the chance to intern at the headquarters of a large, prestigious human rights organization in Washington, D.C. There was a class of 24 of us, and my fellow interns were some of the brightest people my own age I had ever met. They went to schools like Harvard and Princeton, they had advocated on Capitol Hill and fundraised thousands for important causes. During our intern orientation, I looked around in wonder at all this group might be able to do. 

Then we got into the office, and we were all just 21 year old undergraduates again. This was an office of people wearing suits, working 80 hour weeks, hosting senators and celebrities and executing strategies that would create systemic change for the most vulnerable people in the world. And I was an intern, who had never worked in an office before. Even while I worked there I had a feeling that I probably wasn’t contributing enough to justify the desk space I was taking up.

In the years after, it became clearer to me that I was definitely more of a financial cost to the organization than I was a contribution. It has also become clear to me why the organization hired interns anyway, even if they were kind of worthless, even if they couldn’t manage much, even if they took more staff hours to train and support and correct than they contributed. 

What we contributed was the same thing all interns contribute, the same things the interns I hired as a youth pastor contributed: an opportunity for the rest of the staff to remember why they fell in love with their work in the first place. The human rights organization I interned for was a dream job for a lot of those people, an opportunity to serve the most vulnerable people and create real change alongside a team of committed, passionate professionals. But for the people who had pulled long work weeks there for years and years, had seen the glacial, halting pace of change, it didn’t feel so dreamy anymore. The role of the intern was to bring that starry-eyed wonder back, to remind those who have been in their roles a long time how magical it was when they began. 

I recorded a podcast episode with the Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean a few weeks ago, and when it was released, I had a fair number of ministry friends reach out about it, and even one of my former students. My former student told me that what I did sounded really cool. I listened back to the episode myself and I had the thought, wait, yeah, this actually is a pretty cool job, isn’t it? 

It gave me just a taste of that starry-eyed-intern magic again. It has made me engage with my work with a bit more bounce in my step (or fingertips, I guess, my job is mostly on a laptop). All of us who are church leaders, particularly leaders who are doing something innovative, out of the box, or creatively interesting, at one point felt a call on our souls towards what we do. We at some point named that we felt that the God of the universe, who knows us and made us, called us by name to this work.

This work that, more often than not, feels like sending and receiving emails. 

It is still sacred. It is still beautiful, and it is still worth falling in love with all over again. So, what can give us that intern wonder? What practices can we implement to remind us of the mystical wonder of our work? 

1. Tell the story. Write, tell, or even illustrate the story of your call, of how you came to do the work that you do. Point out the ways that God wove the threads of your life together for this, and how you knew once that it was what made you come alive, and read it back, if only to yourself. 
2. Bring in “interns.” If you work with a team of volunteers, then there is probably at least one that thinks the fact that you do this as a job is the coolest thing ever. It might be  a person who felt pressured to go into a career for financial security instead of fulfillment, it might be a person who has never had the opportunity to pour into lives like you have, it might be a young person who is just beginning to hear the call. Bring them closer in, let them see what your day to day looks like, and see if you can catch a little bit of their enthusiasm.
3. Rest. What the storytelling, the interns, and even listening to the podcast all have in common is a capacity to give you the perception of someone with some distance from your work. Arguably the thing that can most effectively do this is take the distance from it yourself. In this Lenten season, try to find some pockets of meaningful rest, relaxation, and Sabbath, and trust that your call will be there when you return. It always has been.