The Stories We Bring to the Table

lessons learned from walking away

After a long anxious wait my name was called. A young woman invited me to follow her to the conference room. It was a large room with an even larger table in the middle. The walls were made of glass, which was not the only reason I felt so vulnerable. A few minutes later two women entered to begin the interview. I was seated at the end of the table. The interviewers to my left and to my right.

There were the usual interview questions. Would you tell us a little about yourself? Why did you apply for the position? What’s your greatest strength? Weakness?

And then one woman asked, “What do you bring to the table?” Followed by the other adding, “specifically, what do you bring that no one else does?”

Now this was a job that I needed far more than I wanted. Sometimes a dream job is the one that pays the bills. It was the third interview I’d had since moving to Florida. I was more than qualified for the role, but it wasn’t a setting where my gifts and skills would be put to good use. My resume had been revised to highlight my qualifications and experience without explicitly indicating that I had once been a minister. Any hints of queerness had been edited out.

So how would I quickly, yet carefully and cautiously, share what I uniquely brought to the table?

I was asked a similar question at a previous interview. That interview was in a much smaller and more intimate space. In a setting where I felt more comfortable or at least more familiar. I was one of two final candidates for a disaster response position with a mainline Christian denomination. A Bishop sat across from me at the table. We mused about theology, the flood story, and pastoral care with hurricane survivors. By the end of the interview, they knew a good bit about who I was and what I brought to the table.

A few days later the Bishop called, saying it was one of the hardest calls they’d had to make. Based on our time together around the table, they felt I’d make a much better pastor than disaster responder. They’d love to have me pursue ordination in their denomination. There were congregations that would want someone like me if I went through more years of examination and evaluation.

That call—the grief and frustration of that experience—returned to me as I sat in the glass room wondering how to answer these questions this time around.

I chose a safe route. I bring creativity and compassion, curiosity and adaptability, loyalty and dependability to the table. What I said wasn’t a lie, but it still felt fake. Bland. Cookie cutter. I was sure I wouldn’t get the job. I was wrong. They loved my stale answers. And a few weeks later I showed up for my first day.

Tables are such strange places. At one table, I brought my whole self, shared honestly and bravely, only to be told they admired who I was, but was clearly called to a role I no longer had the credentials to hold. At another, I kept myself covered, spoke guardedly and sparingly and was offered the position.

This isn’t the only time in my life, I’ve been served mixed messages at a table.

Once, while attending a team meeting my supervisor lifted up praise for “who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming.” They went on to say I pushed the church to go places they wouldn’t have gone on their own and brought people on the margins to the center. A few weeks later, they learned I was lesbian and my seat was removed from the table.

After not attending family holiday celebrations for several seasons, a family member sent me a message. “We miss you at the table,” they said. “We love your stories. Come back and tell us stories that make us laugh and feel good. You are welcome, but your hard and sad stories are not.”

Nina Simone sang “You've got to learn to leave the table when love's no longer being served.”

As painful as those lessons were, in many ways they were easier than the lessons that followed. I spent years searching for a table where there was love. Studying how tables are made and set, cleaned and expanded. Learning over and over again that tables are a source of so much rejection.

Somewhere on that journey something changed. I was no longer trying to find a table where I belonged and where all my stories—not only the ones that made people feel good—were welcome. I realized I was focusing so much on tables, I missed the wonderful spaces calling my name. Inviting me over.

Deep down I thought I wanted a table. With lots of chairs and several leaves, and pretty dishes and perfectly placed utensils, and comfort food and fruity drinks. Sitting in the living room of a third floor San Francisco home with purple walls near the Bay in a comfy wide white chair, sharing my poetry with creative dream doulas, I understood what I was really looking to birth.

I wasn’t looking for a table to replace the one my family folded up. Or to rebuild a table that resembled the one the church said I was unworthy to approach. I was looking for community. For belonging. For affirmation and encouragement. For real authentic connections and genuine conversations. For a place where what I bring is celebrated and part of a collective good, where people inspire me to write and publish and sprinkle my stories around like gold dust and rainbow confetti. And I don’t want these things only for myself. I want them for everyone. For you. And for all your stories.

How often do we miss what is right before us because it doesn’t look or sound or feel or taste like what we left behind?

How many times have we silenced our story because we feared it would cancel our reservation at the table? Or edited our story to take out the parts we believe others will use to exclude us?

What if a table is more like a rock in the river where our stories can breathe?

Or a chess board hidden in the woods where our stories are not played like games?

Or a bridge connecting us with ourselves and the world?

Wednesdays at the Well isn’t a table, but an open-air gathering along the river, with rocks, chess boards, and bridges. I share my stories here that you might share your own. That you might find peace with those parts of your story that feel like chaos. That you would recognize your own gifts and value, that you would cultivate your own creativity.

10CAMELS isn’t a ministry, meant to replace the one that I left. It is an offering of words and water. Stories stirred by experience and emotion, and the things that have caused and quenched my thirst. I don’t write about dry seasons to glamorize them, but to offer hope to others searching for a fountain. I write about healing because no matter what harm we endure, there is life beyond it.

Next Wednesday is a special day. It will be the 100th edition of Wednesdays at the Well on Substack. And as part of the celebration I’ll be sharing exciting details about my next book. A new collection of poetic stories that I’m not bringing to the table, but rather lifting to the light.

Help me celebrate this special occasion by inviting a friend to join Wednesdays at the Well or by becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For paid subscribers, this Friday is a Friday Field Trip, an extra serving of words and water. I’ll be sharing a 55-word story I wrote as part of my experience of becoming a certified listener poet with The Good Listening Project.

Until then.

With a heart full of stories and hands filled with gratitude,
Rebecca & 10CAMELS