Hi friends, family, supporters, and those of you that may have stumbled onto this blog :) Welcome! My name is Michelle Prillaman, and I am one of the Greensboro Fellows this year. When I was asked to write a submission to this blog this week, I dedicated a car drive to silence and contemplation over what I wanted to share with you guys on my turn to post. After mulling through several different things, (there is so much to share, with everything that we are doing!), I settled on a phrase that kept coming up in my heart and mind: Bloom where you are planted.
All ten of the fellows, (in case you haven’t heard, we welcomed a new member to our group a couple weeks ago named Libby Hase!), have come from different places, different people, and different situations. In some ways, we all left things behind in order to embrace new beginnings. Even though some of us are still involved in our previous communities within the area, we have all encountered and embraced new people, places, and ideas. It has been a time full of new friendships and sweet conversations, but also a time of change, uncomfortableness, and growth. And while change, uncomfortableness, and growth is in no way bad, these are things that can be so easy to shy away from out of fear.
And so we have been faced with the following choice: do we lean into the change, the uncomfortableness, and the newness? or do we move away from these things, and choose not to invest? Everyday we wake up and we get to choose. Something I have tried to keep close to my heart is this idea of blooming where I am planted; of investing deeply in the places the Lord has placed me in. I am here intentionally and purposefully for the next 8 months. I am an intern at River Oaks Church. I am a Young Life leader at Page High School. I am a student. I am a mentee. I am a friend. I am a Fellow. All of these things, at least for the next while, are pieces of me. So I lean into the growth, the change, the uncomfortableness. Because I, as we all do, believe that we are here for a reason, and that all these pieces are just part of a much bigger puzzle that God is piecing together with our lives. Ultimately, he is weaving together all of these moving pieces to create something beautiful that we get to be a part of, all the while growing us and making us more like Christ. It is an exciting time.
I have particularly been challenged on this idea of investment in regards to time. I went to school here in the Greensboro area, and so I faced the unique perspective in joining this program not of leaving a life beyond to start something new, but of merging my previous life and community to work in conjunction with a new beginning. This process has been challenging at times to balance. Sometimes its been tempting to lean away from the change and to stay only invested in what I already know. At other times, it has been tempting to move towards what is new and exciting, and to not focus on still growing the community and relationships that I have already had here. And then, as I have struggled with these two tensions, I keep repeatedly bumping into the fact that I am a finite person, with finite resources and time to give. But through that, I have felt the Lord remain constant, and have felt encouraged to still invest where I am, in the places and people that the Lord places in front of me, all the while trusting that he will use these investments to his glory and for his greater purposes.
As our reader, in whatever capacity you are involved, I invite you to join us in this investment. While we are investing in our individual places within this program, we are also learning to invest as a community bound together by Christ. From my experience thus far, the people around us who have chosen to give time and space for investment into us and this program are the ones truly making it what it was designed to be. So grab a cup of coffee with a Fellow. Contact Tripp Graziano about meeting to share with us all. Come to our Pay-It-Forward Thanksgiving event, as we seek to bring unity and community to the Greensboro area. Join us in our quest to invest more deeply in this beautiful city, in the people around us, and in Christ. Join us as we seek to bloom where we are planted.
Thanks Michelle (far right) for the encouraging post!
The Fellows are pictured with Susan Marie and Summer of Coordinated Events.
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