I wanted to gaze out across the city of Quito, nestled in the Andes mountain range, one last time. The next time I gaze out across the city will be when my flight takes off tomorrow morning. (An alternate title to this blog post could have been "Leaving on a Jet Plane.") The time after that, who knows?
When I return to Kansas City tomorrow I will get to spend a month working on various projects and I think I've already set my sights too high for what I hope to accomplish.
During my third and final month of sabbatical, here are a few of the things I will be working on:
+ Developing a modest marketing plan for the book I've edited, The Growing Church, which will be published by Skinner House Books in December.
+ Writing several "thought pieces" that I've been thinking about and developing over the past few months and years. One of these pieces will be a treatise on church staffing. Another one will consist of 95 Theses on Membership and Leadership in church life. A third, to be entitled "Dancing on the Heads of Pins, Stepping on Toes" will be a provocative piece about differences between how the vocation of ministry is talked about and thought about.
+ Finally, I hope to write enough to be able to put together a book proposal for a book with a target audience larger than Unitarian Universalists. The subject of the book will have to do with entering the ministry in your early or mid-twenties.
I leave for the airport in a little less than 7 hours. I'm homeward bound.
