Identity Crisis.

I have just recently realized that I am missing the silver cross that I always wear around my neck. This is extremely frustrating--not only because it feels odd to be in full-time Christian ministry without wearing the symbol of the cross on a daily basis, but because that specific cross meant so much to me.

It was a gift from a friend at a point in time when she felt like she could no longer believe--and I received the cross from her, committing to wear it as a reminder to pray for those who have lost their faith or feel unable to pray.

Losing the cross feels like I have lost my ability to minister in this way. Obviously it was just a symbol, but over the three years that I have worn that cross, I have internalized its value to the point that I feel broken to have it removed from me. Is this why people cry when they lose their wedding rings?--Not because it's a loss of a piece of jewelry--but because you don't exactly realize how deep the symbol's internal significance is until it is no longer there and you feel naked.

Last night, I was talking with one of my girls after Youth Group, and we were talking together about how lonely and abandoned she feels by the mother she has never known and the father who has never grown up to be a real adult. I knew that she didn't know how to pray for herself, and as I reached up to wrap my fingers around my cross, it was not there. It has not been there for the last month.

I still prayed for my girl, but there was a sense that my prayer no longer reached as far inside of me as it has before, because there was not that signifier to connect me with three years of prayers for friends who cannot pray for themselves. We are certainly living in a world of material things, where tangible objects connect us to spirituality and sentimentality in a way that maybe we shouldn't need them to...regardless, I feel as if I have lost a piece of myself that can never be replaced in the same way...and a ministry that was so uniquely mine.