Jimmy Beh

“A colleague said the other day that the career I am in is ‘more process driven not results driven.’ At first, it didn’t mean much, but afterward that made me mad. Life is indeed a process, but I do not create relationships or try to create change to improve the ‘process.’ I roll through the process (life) to make change. To achieve results. I do what I do for results.”

December 10, 2019; Spokane, WA

If you keep your old journals, then you know looking back at them can be quite a cringe experience. But perhaps the greater the cringe the greater the honesty? Right? Asking for a friend…

This past journal entry was written during one of the most difficult transitions in my adult life. I had just finished graduate school in San Diego and had moved to Gonzaga University where I was starting a new role in Student Affairs. A move that was a good opportunity but not my first choice. I did not know anyone in Spokane (other than an ex-girlfriend’s parents). I was desperately searching for a sense of identity in my mid 20s, and I felt quite alone and lost. 

And, if I had, I don’t know, tried to forget some of those painful memories, I quickly found them again by glancing at the other entries. Seriously, if I read one more vision of life goals, or list of ‘essential’ daily habits, or notes from a self-help book I might vomit.

And, yet, beyond the cringe of reading this overly self-righteous journal entry from a lonely and angry 20 something-year-old, I am grateful for the perspective it reveals. Especially now, as I am experiencing another big transition in my adult life– stepping away from Franciscan formation for this next year.

In this new but not foreign liminal space, I am experiencing many of the same emotions from five years ago; sadness, anger, loneliness, and uncertainty. And I have wondered to myself, “how much have I actually grown?” The inner critic gets louder during these times and make us feel like we are going nowhere in life. That life is just a circle, and we keep going around in loops— never answering those big important questions that burn in our hearts as we continue to make the same mistakes— dealing with the same issues. 

But thanks to journal entries like this one, I can see quite clearly that I am not going around in loops, I am, indeed, moving forward—often slowly—but forward on my path, step by step. In 2019, my restlessness had an undercurrent of despair. I was not only uncertain but lost. I had a profound sense of not knowing myself, which made it incredibly difficult to wrestle with the important questions of my life. It felt like I had not honestly listened to my heart in a long time. As if it had been covered over in bandages trying to fit in through the years. But today, my heart is no longer a stranger to me. I have learned to trust it more and more—letting it move me to tears more often and giving it permission to voice itself more freely. And despite moments of loneliness and uncertainty, I have a strong sense of not being alone. 

Most recently, I noticed this growth during the final days of novitiate—visiting with my brothers and talking about our friendship, their support of me, and shedding a tear over our impending separation. At 32 years old, this was a brand-new experience for me. It was not just making an incredibly difficult decision, but also then lingering for a couple days afterwards to sit with those it effected. It took me weeks afterwards to regain some sort of emotional equilibrium. And, yet, lingering in that emotional discomfort with my brothers was perhaps one of the greatest adventures I have ever been on. 

How I was thinking about process and results five years ago is not an uncommon way to think about them. And it is totally legitimate to want our efforts to grow into tangible outcomes. We develop a way of praying because we want the result of being close to God, and we develop strategic plans in organizations to foster better outcomes for our clients and achieve financial sustainability for the institution. Results are the analytics all organizations use to prove their effectiveness and worth to others. That good ole’ Return on Investment (ROI) approach. Fortunately, and often frustratingly for us (certainly for me!)—the Realness of life does not operate on our schedule and the true self each of us craves to unveil eludes us when we try to possess it and present it as our achievement.

We as Christians must never forget that regardless of what the analytics say-at the very center of our faith and our life is Relationship—and relationships are a never-ending process. Whether it is with yourself, with God, or with one another, the results are merely the accidental byproduct of how we participate in our relationships in the present moment. Richard Rohr (and many others) have said, “how you do one thing is how you do everything.” Therefore, it is through the messiness and ordinariness of our relationships that we allow ourselves to be disturbed, shaped, and transfigured into more and more of our true selves. 

In this way, each of us is called to community in some form, and it would seem we spend our lives figuring out what exactly that means and looks like.