I grew up in the small town of Grand Junction, Colorado. My family moved to Colorado when I was two, and so my strongest memories of childhood are walking the goats along the irrigation ditches, climbing haystacks in the fall, and watching the sunsets over my neighbors’ fields – still the most beautiful I have ever seen.

To me, Colorado is my home, and as a child, it was endless. The fields surrounding my house would go on for acres, and my closest neighbor was an exotic animal farm across the street, where sometimes the buffalo or giraffe would escape and I would see a giraffe’s head rising up through a Serengeti of wheat and corn as I got off the bus.

Most of my memories are from  times outdoors, but I remember a tradition that my family had for years as I grew up. Every Friday night would be ‘Pizza and Video Night.’ My mom would go pick up a pizza at the local Pizza Hut (half sausage and mushroom, half supreme), and my dad would pick out a movie from Blockbuster. Fortunately for me, my parents have decent movie taste so by the time I was making my own movie choices, I had a strong foundation of Oscar winning films. Unfortunately for me, my dad can never remember what movies he has seen, and sometimes he would come home, excited to watch The Thomas Crown Affair, only to be told we had seen it four times already.

To live.

This tradition was a habit until my brother left for college, while I was still in middle school. At that point, movies were just a distraction – an escape and a hobby for when I was finished doing my schoolwork or planning on becoming a forensic scientist/F.B.I. agent/political powerhouse (someone’s got to do it). My hobby of film continued through high school until my junior year when my mom discovered there was a volunteer opportunity at Telluride Film Festival. We filled out the applications and headed up 9,000 feet to the little mountain town.

I remember my first year volunteering. I was working at the Galaxy theatre, an elementary school-turned-movie theatre during festival time where my most important duty was filling the soda and changing the popcorn (but what pride I took in my perfect liquid to ice ratio). As I worked with fellow cinephiles or handed free coffee over to actors, I felt a sense of belonging. The people who worked at Telluride did it for no other reason than the fact that they loved films. I would just sit on a cooler and listen to the conversations that people had about the new Jane Campion film, or the influence of Korean directors on the horror genre, hoping to soak up their knowledge. When I would take the gondola back to my hotel for the night, it would not be out of the ordinary to sit next to a major film producer and have a conversation about what films we would be seeing the next day. Being a part of these conversations, whether it on a cooler or a gondola, made me realize that film did not have to be just a hobby. It could be a career – a lifestyle. The festival inspired me to see film as an art form of possibilities. I still remember the moment when film became a tangible idea to me. I was sitting in a theatre and Ken Burns was introducing a series of shorts. The theatre had a quiet coolness about it and the air was thick with a buzzing energy of collective anticipation. Ken Burns mentioned the palpable energy and said to the audience:

This is what film is about. All these people in a room for a common purpose, excited to share in it together. This theatre is our sacred space. This is our holy moment.

I never felt so alive.

To sense.

Although Telluride still feeds that special film part of me every year, by the time I went to college at Santa Clara University, my life was overflowing with different activities, passions, and new sacred spaces. I began attending Peninsula Bible Church my freshman year and by my sophomore year, I felt an inner pull to become more involved. An opportunity arose for me to go on a mission trip to Ecuador, and I knew it was the right fit at the right time when every detail of the trip fell into place without me even trying.

I went with a varied group of people, ranging in age 18-40. For ten days we helped build fences and paths for a local hospital, teach at a missionary kids school, and teach bible studies to children living in squatters villages on the outskirts of the Amazon. One particularly rainy day (so, any day of the trip) our group was waiting out the rain before continuing macheting the never-ending jungle. I sat in a giant white van with two of my friends and the maintenance workers who were supervising us. One of the workers, Rodrigo, began singing an old church song quietly. As he neared the chorus, another person joined in, and within a minute the van was all singing together in an English-Spanish mixture. The simple of act of being together, singing together, waiting together bonded us more than any other event on the trip. When Rodrigo sang, he sang with a joy that can only come from a man who knows who he is and what his purpose is for.

Coming back to the states, I remembered that sense of joy, but as I got off the plane, I felt an absence of it in my life and in my culture. Where was the joy? Where was the appreciation for life? I had everything I could ask for in the states, and yet I complained. As I walked to classes (well, actually just one class because Ecuador decided to give me a parting gift in the form of a stomach virus) the day after I got back, I could only see the privilege and the ungratefulness around me. Every complaint seemed magnified and I yearned to be a part of a culture and community that was pro-active in their hurt as well as their joy.

To create.

Ecuador left a lasting impression on me, and it made the decision to study abroad in a South American country that much easier. In the following fall I went to Buenos Aires and studied for five months. Buenos Aires was a breath of fresh air. It seemed like the perfect mixture: Latin American culture with European ideals, city living with small town mentality, and plenty of attitude. I have a hard time explaining Buenos Aires to people because its people and its streets have a unique character about them. Even the sun has a different light in the city, and every afternoon as the sun hid behind the skyscrapers, the rays would fill every crack of concrete, and I swear, the city would glow.

While I wasn’t studying traveling around the country, playing on a university volleyball team, or practicing my Spanish, I was working at a social financing firm, Impact Economy. I applied for an internship and through my abroad program they set me up with interviews at different locations. I initially thought that I would be working with a media related company because of my interest in film, but there was something about the internship at Impact Economy that made me excited.

I read the job description, got excited, and then had to look up half of the words that were in the company’s mission statement. The job was not glamorous either – I would work for the Geneva based company virtually, doing research on corporate social responsibility and social reporting initiatives. I would not have an office, coworkers, or training. By some miracle I got the job (only two of us applied for two positions), and so I began to research. And research. And then research some more. What struck me though, was that reading the reports did not feel like work. I looked forward to my designated job time where I could go to a local café, read about trends in entrepreneurship and then send my reports off to Geneva. At first, entrepreneurship seemed like a foreign world to me, but the more I read, the more it made sense.

 I was drawn to film because it allows people to create and ultimately do. In my mind, social entrepreneurship is the same way, but in human form, instead of art form. The internship opened my eyes to the amazing changes that people were making all around the world. I want to be part of a movement like that.

I once read a quote by Julie Andrews where she said, “A lot of my life happened in great, wonderful bursts of good fortune, and then I would race to be worthy of it.”

I can identify with that sentiment. I have lived a life blessed with the good fortune to see people live through their love of film, sense the eternal joy of their lives, and create new ways of thinking. I raced toward Telluride, Ecuador, and Argentina; each place giving way to the new burst of adventure.

I look forward to the new good fortunes, continuing racing, hoping to be worthy.