For your amusement: me in a filbert shell.

This is the self-introduction I just sent off to the Renovare Institute. I hate writing these things so do them as quickly and offhandedly as possible.

I am a disciple, pastor, wife, friend, and mother -- a happy combination I never expected and no one would have predicted. (Okay, maybe the friend part. But really: none of the rest of it.)  I have been a pastor 12 years, a wife 12 years, a mother 2.5 years. For 9 years I was a philosophy teacher; for 3 an editor of legal texts and 3 more a specialized paralegal; for 3 a nonprofit PD and ED.  I hold 3 master's degrees and no PhD, which probably makes me either a dilettante or impatient. Those are some of the resume highlights, if you want to call them that.  I also had multiple tattoos and piercings before they were hip; have raised goats and now have chickens; and waitressed the graveyard shift in a diner in the Castro (San Francisco). That's some of the local color.

Here's the real stuff:  the question that has powered every major decision of my life, every educational focus, every political action, every search and research has been, simply, How should one live?  No other question has ever really mattered. I would have done that PhD by now if that were a "legitimate" research area.  But "how should one live?" isn't about research, but about choices, discipline, circumstance, and trajectory. In my particular case, it's also about the Object of my gaze and the teachers God puts in my path whether I'm ready or not.

Which is why I'll see you all in October.