I wish I could live a thousand lives, and I think that’s my fatal flaw. My second biggest flaw is my pen clicking habit. But let’s focus on the first one.

I can plausibly see myself playing folk guitar covers of Bob Dylan songs like I’m Joan Baez, tending to some goats on Prince Edward Island and making apple pies with perfect lattices. But I wouldn’t mind getting a Microsoft Office Specialist certification for my corporate job, posting about it on LinkedIn and retiring at a limber age with money to travel the Midwest and see every giant mouse statue it has to offer. If we’re only counting the ones holding cheese, there’s 21. 

Perhaps I’ll move to Boston with my best friends and live off bread crusts and moldy cheese and roasted pigeon (or whatever it is they eat in the old colonial region), but I could also live with my parents forever, ending each night on the worn leather couch with an episode of “Ghost Adventures.” 

This summer, I interned on a tropical Floridian farm, mostly writing stories for the organization’s publication. During my first week, my boss told me to plant cowpeas by hand on a plot of dark and damp soil. By the time the seeds were all covered and watered, I wanted to trade in my laptop for some overalls and a pitchfork. Maybe put a piece of wheat in my mouth and let it hang out like a cigarette. 

My thousand lives are nice. I’m attached to them and they all reflect some meaningful part of who I perceive myself to be. But I can’t have them all.

While I was interning on the farm, I read “Dark Matter” by Blake Crouch. It’s about a man who’s trapped in an infinite hallway of doors, each one leading to an alternate version of his life. He has to choose one as his home, but he can only open 100 doors. The pressure of decision stalls him. Every choice feels equally right and wrong. He’s stuck. 

In a way, journalism gives me courage to walk down the infinite hallway and open its doors. It allows me to learn about fascinating people and the choices they make. It shows me that decisions don’t end our lives – they give us stories to tell. It lets me, the reader, live another life for a thousand words or so. 

In this issue, you’ll live through the stories The Clarion’s reporters, photographers and designers collaborated on. Hear blaring air raid sirens alongside junior Levi Case, whose Jerusalem study abroad program was cut short at the outset of war. Huddle alongside six-foot-something football players as Steve Johnson recites a final post-game Lord’s Prayer after 35 years of coaching. Follow columnist Devanie Andre through elementary school Indigenous units, visits to her family on the reservation and her current role as co-leader of First Nations. 

I hope as you flip through these stories that you feel you’ve stepped into a few different lives and understood a few more people. I’ll keep checking them off my list of a thousand.

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Stories in this issue

Johnson’s final game epitomizes legacy

A scarred Holy Land

Advice you didn’t ask for: Nursing

Connecting for a change: The Urban Village

Bethel goats and the buckthorn behind them

Go Figure

Sitting with the silence

Healing what the church hurt

Stop quitting your corporate job for your small-town ex-boyfriend

Ring by whenever it feels right

We walked so iPad kids could run

‘Put pen to paper’

A faith found outside the home

Top seven things to do during J-term

From player to coach

Checking the box

A foreign kind of worship

Time in between

Out of order: Accessibility on campus