“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.“
?The Night’s Watch oath

Once upon a time, I had a mission and a purpose.
Initially, that mission was to support people in discovering and cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus. I discovered this calling and then sought to fulfill it within the embrace of the Catholic Church.
The longer I worked in and for the Church, the more I came to realize the sins of the Institution and made it my task, like Sts. Francis and Clare, to reform the Catholic Church – turning it away from fear, power and control and toward the love of Jesus that inspired its inception.
When this proved to be an unwelcome and impossible task, I turned my gaze outside the Institution and sought to support people in becoming spiritually fulfilled – giving them the tools to discover the answer to the following questions and then empowering them to live out their answers:
- Who am I?
- Whose am I?
- What are my gifts and how am I called to use them for the sake of my own fulfillment and then for the sake of the betterment of the world?
The more I offered this support outside the Church, the more I discovered that these are not religious questions, but universal in nature. These are the questions that are answered in our common journey toward self-actualization. In conjunction with this belief, I believed that if we would all just find our self-actualization that we would have peace and harmony in our lives. With this, my mission became nothing short of saving the world! No small goals for Lauri Ann Lumby!
The problem, however, is that the world does not want to be saved.
The sad truth is that the majority of humanity is content to live in status quo, desperately clinging to their judgment, fears, perceived separation, need to be right and the need to make someone else wrong. Even as I write this I am aware of my own culpability in this regard, creating my own version of “us and them.” SIGH!
These are the mountains I used to be willing to die on. These are the battles I fought; the causes I have given my life to; and for which I have risked and lost much. Like a member of “The Night’s Watch,” I have devoted my life to these causes and offered up similar vows. Toward what end? Like Jon Snow who was betrayed and then murdered by his own brothers, I find I have no fight left in me. And like Jon, I turn the cloak I have donned as a champion of Love over to another hand while uttering Jon’s immortal words,
“My Watch is Ended.”
If humanity wants to continue to choose separation, fear, judgment, separation, hatred, violence, war, sickness, poverty, death and despair, who am I to change their mind? I have no need to convince anyone of anything…even the invitation to peace and love. I find it is all I can do to find peace myself and to share what I have learned with a few interested souls. Maybe that is enough for one person’s life, to find their own state of inner peace. For those who are interested in learning the tools that I have found helpful, I will always be here. Otherwise, it seems my watch here is ended.