Tributaries
Before I could name their meeting,
the currents were converging
I drove my 1969 orange Firebird
to Corum’s Flower Shop
and asked to meet the owner.
The week before, Glenn Corum spoke
at a church about his travels in Israel.
My recent spiritual awakening
was still finding its footing.
What I ardently sought
was an apprenticeship working with flowers.
I imagined an atmosphere where my spirit
and creativity could flourish together,
among people whose lives gave substance
to what I was beginning to experience.
I told him what I was seeking
and why I desired to work for him.
He hired me.
Courage and desperation
were close companions that day.
Together, they carried me
across a threshold.
Glenn spoke to me with respect.
In my mother’s family,
the men had diminished me.
Their slights had become
a verdict I carried against myself.
Here was a man
whose integrity extended
to the way he received my thoughts.
In the middle of a working day,
he would pause
to explore a passage of scripture with me.
My curiosity and understanding
had a place in the conversation.
I felt the significance
before I could give it language.
The very qualities I had learned to question
were welcomed into the exchange.
From this distance, I recognize an early
movement of individuation:
I was giving my own longing
authority to shape a decision.
The Five Tributaries
Each stream carried its own sediment.
From the florist’s bench:
how color, form, and placement
compose an atmosphere.
From youth ministry:
how to accompany a life
still finding its expression.
From leading worship:
resonance—
how the unseen becomes felt
through sound and shared attention.
From the corporate world:
how to read systems
and discern the story
beneath the message.
From the small ventures I built:
sovereignty—
the practice of giving my judgment
consequential form.
Corporate Ladders
and Glass Ceilings
Ten truckloads were promised
for a major holiday promotion.
At my company’s request,
I had negotiated the sale.
The client had committed to advertising
and reserved end-cap displays
and additional front-end display space.
A week before the holiday,
the executives reversed their decision.
The shipment was cancelled.
“You deliver the news.”
I asked the executives
if they planned to attend with me,
since the decision was theirs.
“We have previous commitments.”
For two years, I had worked
to restore this account’s relationship
with the company.
Securing its annual agreement was the reason
I had been hired.
My relationship with these directors
reached back nearly a decade,
through an earlier employer.
Now I was carrying a decision
that could undo
what we had built.
I walked into their war room.
Ten store directors sat around
a large oval table.
They were smiling.
Our monthly meetings usually brought
the promotions I had created—
plans we could anticipate together.
Seated among them,
I carried news that would dismantle theirs.
When I delivered the news, the room changed.
As though time itself had slowed,
the scene unfolded before me.
The group’s leader rose
and walked around the table,
voicing his anger at the company.
One director threatened to cancel
the annual agreement.
Others added their disgust.
I understood their anger.
I was also the person sitting before it.
I explained what had happened,
offered my sincere apology, and left feeling sick.
On the slow drive back,
I imagined the consequences
already taking form.
At my desk, five messages waited.
Five of the ten store directors had called.
They wanted me to know
that they understood the position
I had been placed in.
They respected me.
They intended to remain committed
to the agreement
because of the relationship we had built.
Their anger, I believed,
might consume that relationship.
They had reached back to preserve it.
The years of keeping faith with them
had deposited something
I could scarcely perceive
while sitting at that table.
Their messages made it visible.
Trust had acquired a history of its own.
A Voice Can Change the Terms
By Which It Is Heard
The girl who had known the answer
in third grade and could not speak
had become a woman able to carry difficult news
into a room whose welcome would change.
At that table,
I feared what one meeting
could undo.
The messages returned me
to the years that preceded it.
My conduct had been speaking all along.
Each encounter left a deposit:
discernment,
credibility,
the authority to speak.
The tributaries were beginning to meet.
For Your Own Terrain
TRIBUTARIES
Converging Inheritances
Field Notes:
SEDIMENT
A tributary carries
particles of soil and stone
gathered along its course.
Where streams meet,
their waters mingle
with material drawn
from different ground.
For millennia,
the Nile carried sediment
from upstream landscapes
toward the Mediterranean,
depositing material
across its delta.
What arrives downstream
carries a history
from elsewhere.
So do we.
Within a family
Each family line
brings its own inheritance:
ways of offering affection,
expectations of loyalty,
responses to conflict,
stories of endurance,
grief carried into silence.
These inheritances
meet within a life.
One current may teach
that love means giving;
another, that belonging
depends upon achievement.
Generosity and vigilance
may arrive together,
each shaped by conditions
that preceded us.
Other streams enter
through the lives we encounter.
Respect can give us
a new measure of belonging.
Trust can lend authority
to a voice still finding
its own expression.
What we receive later
can change how we understand
what arrived before.
Tracing their origins
helps us discern
what we have received
and how it finds expression
in the relationships
we are forming now.
What have your family’s streams carried—
and where do you notice them
converging within you?
—
Where these currents meet,
what feeling or longing rises—
and what does it reveal
about what matters to you?
—
What will you carry forward
from these converging streams,
and how will you give it expression
in your relationships now?
A FURTHER BEARING
For millennia, the Nile carried sediment
toward the Mediterranean.
The Aswan High Dam changed
how much could reach the delta.
The conditions that formed a landscape
can change while their imprint remains.
Within a family, too,
an inherited response may continue
long after the circumstances
that gave rise to it.
What shaped us belongs to our history.
How we carry it forward
is becoming part of our own.