catapult magazine

Rediscovering fascination

by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma

A couple of months ago, in conversation with several college students in the middle of discerning their lives’ purpose, someone asked me when I “got it,” when I figured out the connection between faith and all of life and the imperative to seek meaningful work through vision and prayer.

The answer didn’t come to me immediately, but after a few moments, I knew it was my English and creative writing classes during my senior year of high school (and I’m very proud to have the teacher of those classes writing for us this issue). In English, we departed from the typical study of grammar and short stories to study the nature of language as a gift from God. Then, in creative writing, I had the opportunity to not only develop my skills as a crafter of language, but also to learn from master crafter Madeleine L. Engle about God revealed through art. Finally, the burden of the senior research paper turned into a blessing when I was given free reign on the topic and chose to research Christian artists’ colonies. Throughout that pivotal year, I was not being taught what to think, but how to think, and something stuck. Thus began several fascinating years of everything I learned bursting into three-dimensional meaning as individual bits of knowledge intersected with one another and with living a life of faith.

I must next admit that, even in the midst of such stimulating work with *cino, that feeling of fascination has started to wane and the waning is directly related to the amount of time I’ve been able to spend in study as of late — which has been all too little. A by-product of this breakdown has been a deterioration of joy in my daily activities and increased pressure to merely fulfill obligations. And so I find myself at a relatively low point, but I am certainly not without hope.

I’m grateful for the way this issue’s feature puts my sense into words and story — that life is a series of turning points and that we are constantly in motion, shedding our skins to confront the next step in the process of full transformation. The knowledge of this process gives me hope that my condition is only temporary and that, with a little effort toward disciplined study, every day events will again be as clearly significant as they were just a short time ago.

Simultaneously, I long to move forward and backward to grow in knowledge and spiritual maturity, but to return to a time when the whole world was new. Fortunately, I can achieve both at once—that’s the beauty of constant conversion—and I’m confident that I’m headed in the right direction.