What should I do? CONFLICTED!

 

After spending 40+ years writing every week for some media publication, whether it be a local newspaper, agriculture publication or for my church, it's time to hang it up. At least I think so. I am conflicted.

For a while now, after calling my own tune for more years than I care to count, I am thinking of getting out of the newspaper article ratrace. The reason I'm conflicted? I don't want to let my community down. For the past 40 years I have run to one event after another, including covering high school sports, giving up many things I'd really like to do. I've missed some family things, some church things, and even some personal events, so that I could write about happenings in the Newell, Vale and Nisland area.

To be clear, I've also received a lot of joy from the job as a freelance journalist. And, since I live and work in a small community, pretty much everyone knows me, even if I can't put a name to their faces. (Smile)

And to be sure, I've got no great talent and am clearly not the only one who could do this job. However, when you live in a small community and function as a news source, covering church and community events, retirements, fundraisers, city and school meetings and the like, you begin to feel a sense of responsibility to the commmunity. As you watch the kids grow up in the school, writing about their achievements (big or small) and make friends withh school staff and others in the community, it makes it hard to just lay down the pen (or the keyboard in my case) without someone there ready to step into my shoes and carry on.

Because I have always worked freelance, I have never had a committment of an actual job where I had to answer to an employer. And yet, I do answer, as I cover events in my county and share the lives, talents and sometimes heartbreak of those who live there in journalistic fashion. So, I have a committment to submit a certain amount of "news" from the NVN area and in my true "worrying" fashion, I am concerned about who will come behind me.

But I am ready to trust that it is time. I have felt that for a while now. My family has encouraged me to just set a date and not worry about what (or who) comes next. God has it in His hands.