I'm so glad you're here!

I love words. I love to speak them, to write them, to discover the origins of them. I love to put them together in phrases and sentences to do my best to convey a thought or a picture.

 

I love the word vocation. It comes from late Middle English, which came from Old French, which came from the Latin word vocare, meaning "to call". It’s often used today to describe a profession, as in “vocational training”. Going back centuries, it has carried an air of the divine - a spiritual calling.

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When my second child was diagnosed with autism in 2004, I had the breath of vocation stir my heart. Then it wasn’t believed that neurodivergence ran in families, so having two children with autism seemed divinely deliberate to me. I knew I needed to explore what that meant for me professionally.

 

So when another mom of an autistic child approached me with an idea to create a film about autism for neuromajority children, my heart leapt. Here’s how the vocation manifests, I thought. And it really did.

 

We started a nonprofit organization that reached tens of thousands of people with a message of autism awareness, acceptance, and empathy. I remember having a conversation with a colleague near the end of that 17-year chapter of life and telling her this was a vocation for me. I am called to have this conversation about accepting autism.

 

So here I am having a conversation with you. Thanks for being an audience to my vocation. I hope your heart is stirred, too.