I’m writing out a few stories of the transformative moments around my journey at NeighborLink as a way to reflect, document, and share how NL has been such an integral part of life for me. I end my time as Executive Director on January 29th, 2021 after 13 years.
There isn't a more personal transformative story of my time at NeighborLink than the one of meeting Michelle Hoffman on an NL project, which will continue to be transformative for the rest of our lives.
We first met when Michelle and her friends signed up for a project I was leading at FMC. It was a yard reconstruction project due to sewer line repair for a wonderful family that was dealing with medical conditions for 3 of 4 of their family members. (Funny story is that this family is still connected to NL and loves to remind us that their project was the first project we met on. We got to know them over time as we would spend time with them.) We also met at the Rialto Theatre where we would meet up as volunteer teams due to its central location and its initial demolition work by the Reclamation Project at the time. All important details for our long-term story.
That project connected our friend groups and made it much easier to talk to her in the future weeks on projects and through a young adult ministry we ended up being a part of. This was right before I took on Jean's project, and I would use that project as a way to invite her to come scope the project out and meet the homeowners with me.
The story we laugh about the most is that my office at the time was near her apartment and she invited me over for dinner after work before going to look at the first project together. It was definitely not a date, but a great glimpse into the heart of Michelle and I knew I needed to spend way more time with her however possible. I thought making me enchiladas and inviting me over was pretty forward, but definitely not complaining. (Michelle can add her side of the story in the comments).
We spend the next couple of months doing projects together while getting to know each other before I had the confidence to ask her out on an actual date. We continued to volunteer and weave our lives together from then on. Michelle was and is always a more compassionate, engaging, and loving neighbor who is gifted at connecting with people in a deep, relational way. I just overthink things and she's the real neighbor.
We kept serving together and learning about what it means to be a neighbor. We were in a community with others willing to have big conversations about what it looks like to fully immerse ourselves in mission as a lifestyle, not just an activity. As we moved towards buying a house, we felt led to be intentional about being in proximity to where we were spending the majority of our time serving, and we wanted to live in proximity to neighbors who were doing the same.
So, we kept going with it and decided alongside Joe and Steph Johns to buy houses in the same urban neighborhood. They found a house immediately and it took us about a year to find a place. Then another almost year to transform that house into our home. The fear of that decision is that you won't have good schools, you'll have questionable neighbors, you'll be unsafe, and you won't have access to as much.
What we found is a neighborhood full of incredible people that also moved intentionally into the neighborhood in the decades and years before us for similar and related personal reasons. The unifying piece for us all is that we believe in community, diversity, and a shared vision that we all have a role to play in creating the community we want to be a part of, not avoid the hard things. Our desire to be on mission in a space was quickly replaced with the idea of simply being our best selves among neighbors.
We often hear that "work-life balance" is an essential part of living a healthy life, and I would agree that we have to keep the percentages of time doing both in check. However, NeighborLink has taught me that it is far more fulfilling to have a "work-life integration" philosophy and find a way to embrace it all as one. It's all mixed up anyway and why not figure out a way to align it all rather than try to manage the balance of the buckets?
Michelle and I are on that journey and it began on day one of our relationship together. The work we both do, the places we live/shop/play, where we send our kids, the relationships we invest in, the extra-curricular activities we do, etc. We now absolutely love serving as a family and seeing our kids have fun out on projects. It definitely gets out of balance at times, but it helps in discerning what we do and how much we do it.
All I know is that I'm grateful Michelle signed up for that project and she kept saying yes to my covert attempts of volunteerism to spend time getting to know her.
This story could go on forever! And, it will.