My ears have been tuned into the frequent use of the metaphor "one's moral compass." This is not a new metaphor, yet, recently I took pause to ponder it.
I worked two summers as Program Staff for the WPA Annual Conference Camping Program. Prior to the start of the summer camping season, all program staff gathered at Wesley Woods for several days of training; instruction on the structure of the campig program and how a typical week would run were fine. However, the majority of the training focused on outdoor skill sets in efforts to make us some kind of Wesleyan Wildnerness Scouts. I was fine with this having spent much time in the woods hiking, cooking out and camping.
Then, the bar was raised and instruction focused on specifics such as orienteering and how to use a compass. Seriously? We weren't taking a group of elementary age children to the back woods where we'd need to build our own shelter, find clean water to drink, forage for berries and track, hunt and kill our own food. Besides, my assignment was Camp Jumonville the largest of the three camps and the one often referred to as "the pavement palace."
I paid close attention to the presentation on orienteering, that a compass is a magnet directed by the eath's poles...yadda, yadda, yadda. Of course, this instruction was not concluded by a written test. Nope. We were asked to show our orienterring skill set by using a compass.
We each were handed a compass and a series of coordinates and in static starts were sent out.
After ten minutes of intense focus on my compass and following the provided coordinates, I stopped to look around. No one....absolutely not one person...was anywhere near me. I looked further and off in the distance I saw the other counselors either gathered at the camp's chapel building (made sense the coordinates would lead there) or in various stages of soon to be arrived and with the others.
Not me. I was in the far reaches at the back of the camp, on the very border where the grabage was collected and the trash was thrown out. I was in the throw away zone.
At first, I took this as a negative and I was filled with self doubt and questioned my being selected for this job. The Program Staff interview process had over 150 applicants for 15 positions. I was in the last interview group on a long day of interviews. I knew not one person seated at the table who interviewed me. I thought it went OK, yet, also figured it was one of those "who you know" deals. Yet, I was hired. I was chosen.
At the first meeting of the Program Staff Trainig, the conference Camping Director said to us, "You may think you chose this. You may think your skills and charm put you here. I want you to know God has a reason for each of you being here."
I've remembered and held those words since they were first spoken. It was during my work as a Program Staff Camp Counselor that I receved the call to ministry.
Thinking back on that orienteering lesson, I've come to see that my "moral compass" has always been directed to those on the margins, outside of the norm. I am called to be with those on the edge of things, the easily labeled, the ignored, the thrown out and tossed away.