By Jill Szoo Wilson
One cold, misty evening in January, I was sitting on my couch, scrolling through a website that lists job openings in my area. I was looking for a part-time position to run in tandem with my teaching assignment for the Spring semester. While my teaching load for the following school year included an overload between courses and directing a play, my Spring semester had quietly unraveled. Three classes had dwindled to one due to enrollment. Then that single class was enrolled at half capacity, which meant I would receive half of my pay.
I was still just as eager to begin the semester. The work itself had not diminished. But I needed to supplement what had quietly disappeared.
Anyone who has lived inside contract work in higher education knows its strange duality. The work is beautifully fulfilling and wildly unpredictable. During the first decade after graduate school, I averaged five classes per semester and often directed a show or coached a forensics team. I taught at two major universities, one surrounded by fields and open sky, the other pressed into the pulse of the city. On any given week, I might hear speeches about crop rotation and cattle auctions, then read papers on bioethics or constitutional law. I moved between farm boots and briefcases without leaving the classroom.
That panoply of subjects, people, and cultures has been a jewel box in my life. I did not take it lightly.
Two weeks ago, I chose to leave higher education. Not because it failed me. Not because I lacked joy there. A casual couch scroll opened a door I had not been seeking. A senior writing role at a large nonprofit ministry drifted across my screen. The position was full-time. I was searching for part-time. I still do not know why it appeared before me.
Yet as I read the description, something in my stomach came alive. It felt like excitement braided with fear. The kind of recognition that arrives before logic can intervene. A little too good to be true.
So I applied.
After a rigorous interview process, I received the phone call that shifted the trajectory of my career. As of today, I have completed my first week as a professional writer. I will also be able to weave in my love of performance by coaching actors and eventually directing in-house video and on-screen advertising projects.
Gratitude feels too small a word. But it is the truest one I have.
If you have followed my writing for any length of time, you know that my life detonated in 2020. There have been extraordinary highs and devastating lows since then. I will not rehearse those chapters here. I will say this: 2020 taught me that as long as we can breathe into the palms of our hands, we have choices. And life will change.
Sometimes it explodes. You hear the pieces fly overhead and crash down around you like shards of nuclear glass.
More often, life alters you quietly. It presses into the most meaningful parts of who you are becoming with a force so subtle you almost miss it. Sometimes change comes in the middle of a storm on the high seas, with sharks circling below. Other times it arrives with a sip of chamomile tea and the small square of space your finger occupies on a trackpad.
In the meantime, God. Always God. Orchestrating. Allowing the good, the bad, and the heartbreaking to fashion you into who you are becoming, at both the cellular level and in the broad strokes of His artistry.
Over the past year, I wrote more than I had ever written before. As that season began to close, I realized how much I would miss the act itself. The shaping of sentences. The long wrestle toward clarity. That realization drew me toward this new role. Especially once I saw that I could invert the hierarchy I had lived within for years. Writing would become the vocation. Theatre would become the ministry.
I have learned to keep my eyes awake. Not merely open, but awake to the possibilities of being alive inside a life that refuses to remain fixed. We cling to routines, to jobs, to people, to time itself. We hold them tightly as we dodge and sometimes integrate the slings and arrows that fly across this world. Yet life keeps moving. And so must we.
I will end with this.
Yesterday evening, I was hiking through a wood I know well. As sunset approached, the shadows lengthened and the creatures that run across the forest floor and the birds that alight above grew restless. It was loud. Urgent. Like an airport terminal at dusk. Everyone coming and going, crossing and recrossing the same narrow paths.
I stopped.
My stillness felt amplified against the constant motion around me. Above me stood tall, thriving trees preparing themselves for Spring. At my sides lay trunks that had fallen long ago, softened by time and weather. Growth and decay in the same frame. Arrival and departure breathing the same air.
And in the midst of it, I thought, This is life.
And it is beautiful.
Jill Szoo Wilson 