January 6, 2026 • 35 mins
In today's episode, Laura and Sarah open up with some discussion of ringing in the 2026 New Year, and then Lauren Kurakto, an Episcopal Priest, joins Laura for a fascinating discussion about how she leads a meaningful and fun life while thriving in a career that is (by definition!) variable, unconventional, and often demanding.
In the Q&A, a listener writes in asking for Laura and Sarah's take on aptitude tests and categories, from the chronotype to Myers-Briggs to the Enneagram.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer,
and course creator. We are two working parents who love
our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is airing in early January of twenty twenty six.
(00:48):
I am going to be interviewing Reverend Lauren Carratko, who
is an episcopal priest in suburban New York. So very
excited to hear from her about how she manages her
life and all the things she has going on. This
is our first episode in the new year, a couple
of days into the new year. But I have a question, Sarah.
(01:08):
We all know that you're a bit of a morning person.
Do you think you will have stayed up until midnight?
We're recording this in December, but do you think you
will have been up till midnight? On the New Year.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Okay, to be fair, if I were doing something really
fun that evening, or if I was at a party,
or even if I were with my husband and he
wasn't on call, I think I would stay up till midnight.
But as the reality has it, we cannot both take
both Christmas and New Year's off, and so since we
are traveling for Christmas, we are not work free on
(01:39):
the New Year's week, so my husband will be on call,
and therefore I doubt we're going to be doing anything spectacular,
and I will probably go to better on ten or eleven.
I'm sure the kids will be up.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Though I was gonna say, don't your kids want to
stay up for midnight?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
How to?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And they can feel free to do that, ok But
it won't keep you up. They won't be so loud
that impossible. Probably we'll hear them cheer up midnight, and
that's fine. That's fine, Okay, all right, good to know. Well,
we'll see. I've been up till midnight most years. I
believe very few that I wouldn't have been, but who knows.
(02:13):
Things could always be different. But I suspect my whole
family will be up till midnight. Because that's just how
things go around here. So before we get into the
interview of a portion of our show, Sarah, you just
wanted to say something for listeners.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yes, and we don't do this very often, but before
we start this episode, I just want to apologize for
something I said on a prior guest episode that a
listener alerted me to.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
A few weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
We had been talking about fertility challenges in our intro
and I said something about being worried about a third
child coming out wrong. I use those words if I
waited too long to get pregnant. And we don't script
our episodes, and I have to hope that if I
had thought about what I was saying, I would not
have said that or used that language. But I did,
and I really want to apologize because not only was
(03:01):
it absolutely terrible language, but it was a faulty sentiment,
as we all know. And we've even talked about on
the show before and had wonderful guests sharing how every
human in this world has value and there is no
such thing as wrong. So please, if you heard that
and we're heard by it, I hope you can accept
my apology. Fresh start in the new year, Fresh start,
(03:22):
for sure. Yeah, it's the challenges of a nonscripted show.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
We say a lot of stuff and it's hard to
think through everything ahead of time. But of course we
always want to be inclusive and loving to all people,
and we welcome that and we always welcome feedback. So
if you want to reach out to us, you always can.
Laura vandercam dot com. Sarah's got her information up as well,
and so please let us know if you hear us
(03:47):
say something that you would like us to address. So
we're very excited to talk with Lauren. We have not
had any ministers on the show before, but there are
a lot of women in that career and it raises
its own special challenges of managing work in life because
being a spiritual leader tends not to be a Monday
(04:10):
through Friday, nine to five kind of job. I have
nothing else you usually see, you know, if you're in
the Christian tradition, you tend to see people on Sunday mornings,
so they're clearly working on that day. So right there,
the schedule is different. But of course there's a lot
of things that happen all one hundred and sixty eight
hours the week when you're in this line of work.
So she's going to share what comes out of that,
(04:31):
and I'm excited to hear from it. So we'll hear
more from Reverend Lauren Karatko. So Sarah and I are
delighted to welcome Lauren Karatko to Best of Both Worlds. Lauren,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I'm such
a fan.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, well, we're really excited to have you too. Why
don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I'm Lauren Karatko. I'm an Episcopal priest. That means I
am a Christian minister, and I am a mother. I
have three boys, ages six, ten, and twelve. I'm a wife.
My husband's also a priest, and we both work full
time and we live in the suburbs of New York City.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Awesome, And I'm sure everyone's listening to this, like, well,
we have not had an episcopal priest on the show before.
How did you wind up in this line of work?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I felt called by God. It is that simple. When
I was in college, I was can I tell my
calls for you? All right?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
We'd love to help me grief.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I promise it's okay. When I was in college, I
felt called by God to become a priest. So what
that means is I was worshiping in church on Sunday morning,
and I just had this vision of the priesthood, which
is kind of funny because I thought I wanted to
be a doctor, but I hate the sight of blood.
This is not ever going to work out. And so
(05:48):
I called my mom. My Mom and I are really close.
I was in Memphis, Tennessee. She was in Montgomery, Alabama,
and I called her and I said, Mom, Mom, I
have something I have to tell you, and she said
I do, but she's a really good mom, so she
let me go first. And so she let me go first,
and I said, I feel called to be a priest.
(06:08):
And mind you, I'd never seen a woman priest at
that point in my life. And she starts sobbing, and
I thought that I was in so much trouble because
I wasn't becoming a doctor. But the reason she was
sobbing was she had been praying in her church that morning,
five hours away, and she opened her prayer book and
a piece of stationery from my job that summer was
(06:29):
on the page of the ordination to the priesthood, isn't
that cool?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well, that sounds fairly divine.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Then it felt like it was meant to be. So
that's where we go. And I'm a very practical person,
so I did lots of internships and all that kind
of stuff throughout college to see if this is really
what I wanted to do. And now I've been here.
I celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my priesthood this week,
so I've been a priest for twenty years.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
That is amazing. And like you said, you had not
seen a woman priest before, and in the Episcopal Church
there are ordained women. It's one of the denominations that
does that. But it's still not terribly common, right, Well.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
It depends on where you live and what region you're in.
I think pretty much everywhere in the United States at
this point you would see women priests. But where I was.
I'm from Montgomery, Alabama, and I had not seen them
at that point in the late nineties, and there probably
were to be fair Episcopal priest in Alabama at that time.
I just didn't know them. But now I've seen many
(07:28):
priests And a fun tagline for our story is that
later after I went to seminary. My mom also went
to seminary and became a priest, has lived out her
ministry and is now retired and doing what we might
call other duties as a sign back in our home
Diocesis of Alabama.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
That's amazing. I love that you both felt called to
do this.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
So, I mean obviously said you did internships after you
had this revelation that you wanted to go into the priesthood.
What is the training actually like for someone going into
church leadership and spiritual leadership like this?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Oh? What a good question. Okay, So it's different for
every single diocese, a dioceses of region. So right now
I'm in the Diocese of New York, which goes up
towards what you might think of as upstate New York,
but not all the way and into Manhattan. But Long
Island is another diocese. So each diocese has different sets
(08:23):
of rules and where I came from in the Diocese
of Alabama, we needed to spend time discerning which is
prayerfully considering your vocation with a priest for about six months,
and then we went to a commission on the diocesan
level of folks it's called the Commission on Ministry of
folks who listened for that call to hear where God
(08:46):
was active and present in my life, just see if
I might be a good fit. The other thing they
do is we have pretty extensive psychological, physical background checks,
all of those kind of things to make sure that
we are going to be as healthy as they can
guess on the front end before we go out into
the ministry. And then I went to seminary for three years.
(09:08):
I have a master's in Divinity from Virginia Seminary, and
that's actually where I met my husband, who is again
there's three priests in my family. My husband's one. Two.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Well, I imagine that I know other industries where you
have two people who are in the same industry. Sometimes
it can be hard to find a place where both
of you can do. I mean, whether it's like matching
both as a physician, or if you're both professors or
something like that. So how on earth did you guys
go on the job market for finding churches to lead
as both priests?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Absolutely well, in the Episcopal Church, we're essentially free agents,
so we get to apply for jobs and see if
we might match with the congregation. And what we have
chosen to do is live in major cities, so like
right now we're outside of New York. I'm rector of
Grace Church, which is this wonderful, progressive, eighty family church
(10:00):
that I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit.
And my husband is the episcopal chaplaine and Religious Life
Advisor at Columbia University and also does many other duties
as assigned. But what that means is he works for
the diocese kind of the governing body, and I work
for a parish. So we didn't have to find two
(10:21):
churches open at the exact same time in.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The same area, yes, which could be challenging for sure.
So art Yeah, And when in the of course of
all this you start your family, then, was that while
you were at your current church or in a different role.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
No, it was in a different role, So we started
our family. He wrote his PhD in theology at Emory
and so we lived there in oh, gosh, I'm not
going to get the dates right, but a dozen years ago,
and we decided it was time to start the family.
So I was the associate rector, so that means I
was not the head of the church. The second or
(10:57):
third or fourth in command, depending on how our churches.
I was at that parish and we got to have
both our older two children in Atlanta. They're only two
years apart. And then we moved to New York for
his job and I was job searching, and that's when
we had our third.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Awesome.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
So one amazing thing about Grace Church is that they
hired me when I was six months pregnant, and one
of the leaders at the time said, maternity leave is
short and rectors are long, and I wish that we
had more of a vision for that, that maternity leave
is important, or parental leave in general is important, but
it's not that long in the scope of years that
(11:37):
we are in jobs.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, that you're better off waiting a couple months for
the right candidate to be ready than to pass on
the right candidate just because she's in the in the
middle of growing her family. Well, that's a good point
to take our first ad break on. So we'll be
back in just a minute with more from Lauren correctco. Well,
(12:07):
I am back talking with Lauren Kratko, who is an
episcopal priest in suburban New York. So, Lauren, this is
perhaps obvious for our listeners who are part of faith communities.
But being a minister is not exactly a nine to
five Monday through Friday job. I mean, one obvious difference,
you're working on Sunday morning. So maybe you could talk
a little bit about what the schedule looks like for you.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Absolutely no week, is the saying, that's for sure. We
have most clergy I would assume have pretty sporadic schedules,
but I do work full time. I have a brother
in Alabama that always, if he calls me on a
Monday afternoon, is like, what are you doing? You only
work on Sunday, But of course he knows that I
work other hours than that. So what I tend to do. Actually, Laura,
(12:53):
your book was so helpful to me when you were
telling us about split shifting, and I know how she
does it. I didn't realize that I had been doing
it until I saw myself in your words. But what
I tend to do is work Monday to Thursday while
my children are in school. So that's essentially I drop
(13:14):
them off at seven forty five and I work until
write at like two fifty to fifty five, and I'll
run over and pick them up from carpool, and that's
when I tend to schedule most of my meetings if
I know that it's a scheduled meeting with someone that
has some flexibility, and then my church doesn't need me
to be a priest generally from about three to six,
(13:34):
so I'm mom a lot during that time. I'm running
kids to different sports, I'm taking them to therapy, I'm
taking them wherever it is they need to go, and
I'm helping with dinner. And then my husband comes in
from the city and we eat dinner together and then
we trade off. He takes the kids and kind of
does the night, the bedtime, all of those good activities.
(13:55):
And that's when churches often have committee meetings, right so
the property committee would meet or the governing body would meet,
and I meet with them in the evenings. So that's
generally what my schedule looks like. But I feel like
I've left off the fun part, which is the priest thing.
I get to meet with people. I care so much
about what is going on in people's life, to hear
(14:15):
about their journeys with God, but also what's going on
with them with their kids. A lot of parents right
now are dealing with that sort of sandwich generation of
taking care of their parents and also taking care of
their kids. So I have a lot of meetings about that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, and do you generally have then your schedule b
sort of Sunday through Thursday is roughly what you do.
I mean, obviously there's probably at hoc stuff that happens
on Friday and Saturday as well, but that's generally your schedule.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yes, Friday is both my and my husband's day off,
and which are really hard to take our days off
and not check our email and do all those things. Yeah,
so yeah, and then Saturday is often kids' activities, but
also sometimes there are events with the parish that I
do then.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
And I'm curious. I mean, now, I'll see all your
kids are in school and so you have sort of
that dedicated time. But when they were littler and you
both had jobs in ministry or in training, how did
you guys work out childcare?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Then we were so lucky. We had full time daycare
with all three of our children, and so they were
at the Clifton School at Emory and then here there's
a Goddard School, So our youngest was in a Goddard school,
so that was full day daycare, and then we have
a lot. Right now, I have a very long text
(15:32):
group of great high schoolers that baby said, our boys
at all kinds of times. So they are wonderful and
happy to jump in and help us out.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Oh wonderful. That's great to takes a village. And I
think one thing, you actually live on the church property, right,
so that makes at least commuting slightly less of a
thing in your life.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
It's true. I'm giggling because Laura and I did a
time study together and she saw how many times I
was letting the dog out at six forty five or
seven fifteen in the morning talking to a church member. Yes,
our house is directly in the middle of the campus.
The church is on one side in the parish hall,
which is where we have a preschool, a counseling center,
(16:13):
and also our church offices is on the other side.
So my commute is very short. But it does mean
that anytime I walk out of the house, I'm kind
of on and working.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
You could be found at any time. You've got to
be careful walking out the door.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Sure, it's true. I do spend some Fridays I try
really hard at least once some months to go off
campus and just go wander, wander around New York City,
go do some errands, do things that are away from
campus to help me not work.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, well, you mentioned that you had tracked your time
for me, which is true. I got to see Lauren's
time logs recently. What was the experience like of tracking
your time? Was it revelatory in any way?
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Oh? My gosh, I loved it. Part of what was
nice was I got to see some of the goals
that I had set in the past become real. A
couple of years ago, I set a goal of spending
more time with my friends. I think all of us
have friends, but sometimes don't get to be in touch
with them as much as we liked. And the week
at time track for you, I got to go to
(17:15):
a baseball game with one of my friends. And then
it happened to be the week of our anniversary. So
another goal had been scheduling regular date nights, and so
we also had a date night. And it felt kind
of victorious to be like, yes, these are things we
tried to do and they are actually happening. So that
was really good. And then also work wise, when I timetracked,
(17:38):
I spent time tracking exactly what I was doing for
my job. Was I doing administrative stuff for my job?
Was I doing past full stuff for my job? Or
was I doing property maintenance which was a pain point
for me at the time. And so, Laura, you were
so helpful in helping me see how much time I
was spending on property rate notes, and also you and
(18:00):
the group at Besley Plans Live helped me come up
with some good suggestions for that.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah, so Lauren shared her schedule. She was an attendee
at Bestlaid Plans Live. Sarah and I discussed our retreat
a couple weeks ago on the show and how much
fun we had with that. But yeah, I mean some
of the cool things we saw you were doing, like
walking meetings with people, that's I mean, a great way
to multitask. And you also figured out kind of looking
(18:26):
forward to the week when you could do things like that.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Right, Yeah, that was one of the things I really
wanted to do was move more. I had done a
really good job of building yoga into my schedule by
waking up early, but I couldnt figure out where to
get in walking, and so I realized, through your guys's help,
if I in my weekly planning, looked at next week
and said, oh, I'm meeting with the rabbi next week.
(18:52):
We don't need to sit and have a cup of coffee.
We could go for a walk. That was a helpful
way to do it, and that's actually become something that
I'm doing with my congregation every Sunday morning at church.
I say, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome any guests
or visitors, and then I say, if you would like
to join me for a walk on the aqueduct, which
is the walking path near us, or a cup of tea,
(19:13):
I'd love to hear what's going on in your life.
And I cannot tell you how many folks have taken
me up on that. So now it's like we have
a whole church full of people that are walking on
the walking path. Now it's really fun.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Well, what a great way to get more exercise into
your life. And I mean maybe make even the whole
congregation a little bit more healthy as well. Right, we're
all everyone's getting up and moving. But yeah, one of
the things we saw in your log is that you
are spending a lot of time on property management. I mean,
some of this just comes with the territory. It's a
small church. You're the only full time employee, right, I
(19:45):
mean it's going to fall to you.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So we ended up realizing we
were so lucky. We got a grant, and the grant
the parish hall building got to be the inside got
to be repainted and recarpeted, which was wonderful. But when
that happened, we saw that our furniture was perhaps long
(20:07):
many many years past its best by date, and so
we ordered somebny furniture. And I had made announcements in
church and even put it in our weekly email to
see if folks would help me put the furniture together, which,
of course you'd think, yeah, of course someone would sign
up and they would come help and that. But everyone
else is busy too, and so it ended up I
spent something crazy like ten hours the week that I
(20:31):
was time logging putting together furniture. But what was helpful
about that was I was able to say the governing
body of the church, like, obviously, guys, this is not
a great use of my time. And so we were
able to find someone that we could pay a handy
person to do some of those tasks. Going forward. So again,
timelog very helpful.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Timelog very important, But I think that was sort of
a subset of because then you kept track of a
second week, and obviously it didn't have to assemble a
whole new pack of I can't furniture second week. But
you are also spending a lot of time on administrative work,
which again is not necessarily the spiritual leadership of your community.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
That's right, that's right. And so in the Episcopal church
there are different roles, and if your role is called director,
that means you're the head of a congregation. And so
of course I am aware that being a rector means
I have administrative work to do, but also being the
only full time employee meant I had more than my
fair share of administrative work to do. And so through
(21:31):
time longing, I was able to see how many hours
I spent that particular week with sort of big administrative
projects that needed to get done preparing for our annual meeting,
for example, that's a once a year kind of thing.
But I worked with you guys to figure out how
to kind of plan for the unexpected and build in
(21:51):
time blocks. If I can look ahead and see, oh,
the annual meetings coming up. I'm going to need multiple
hours for admin next week. Then maybe schedule fewer walks.
That's so good. I have time to get that duck.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, looking ahead is always good. When do you do
your weekly planning? I know you don't work on Fridays,
so when do you do it?
Speaker 3 (22:10):
It's true, Well, so you used to say Friday afternoon,
but Friday's my day off, So I do Thursday afternoon,
which I think means we plan the same afternoon at
this point.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yep, I've kind of shifted as well.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
I have not perfected Laura's method of two weekends, like
where you loosely plan and tightly plan. I can only
do about one week in advance.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So well, that sounds good. That's good enough to at
least be planning a little bit ahead. Well, we're going
to take one more quick ad break and then i'll
be back with more from Lauren. Well, I am back
(22:51):
talking with Lauren Carotco, who is an episcopal priest in
suburban New York. So we've been talking her schedule and
so Lauren, I mean, I'm sure you are thinking of
upcoming weekends, not just the immediate one, And partly because
you're planning services for upcoming weekends. When do you wind
up doing things like that, I mean planning through upcoming sermons,
(23:13):
upcoming service things that you need to do.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah, I try to set a time block on my
calendar about once a month to do some of that
sort of bigger thinking ahead visioning. In the Episcopal Church,
we work off of the church calendar, which has seasons.
So right now we're in the season of Advent. So
I did some preparing. Advent is the time where we
prepare for the coming of Christ, and so I did
some time thinking through what would be some preparatory things
(23:39):
that we could do together as a congregation. I did
that about a month ago. We're now looking forward to
Christmas and then, which is great fun. We have a
children's Christmas play where the kids get to pick their
own roles. So some years we have two Mary's and
no Josephs. Some years we have way too many sheep
and no shepherds. But we do what the kids wants
(24:02):
to do because it gives them some empowering. They learn
the story better if they're doing something that they want
to be a part of. So right now we're in
the thick of Christmas. Planning getting ready for Christmas Eve services,
and then in January with our staff, we'll do all
longer look ahead for the rest like that whole essentially
semester January till June, and then in Jane we'll do
(24:26):
the fall semester as well. So we kind of plan
a semester at a time at our church.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Gotcha, gotcha? And how about time for your own sort
of reflective time, your own spirituality. I know that probably
filling that well is something that you obviously have to
make space for in your line of work. And yet
you're as busy as anyone else. You're busy running your
church and raising your family. How do you protect time
(24:51):
for that?
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, for myself, I love yoga. I definitely do yoga
three days a week and more if I can, And
so that's I wake up earth earlier than the rest
of my family. So I can do that, and I
use that time to meditate, check in, connect my body
back to my brain because sometimes that doesn't happen so well.
But a practice that I have that helps me stay
(25:15):
connected to my prayer life is actually when I finally
make it into my desk. So who knows what time
that could be in the Episcopal Church, we have what's
called the Daily Office, where we can pray different prayers
throughout the day, and there's these wonderful resource called daily
devotions for families. And it's like two to three minutes long.
It's very brief. But when I get to my desk,
(25:37):
if it's morning, I do morning daily devotions, if it's lunchtime,
I do noon. It's the afternoon, I do the afternoon
daily devotions. And during those daily devotions, it's a piece
of scripture. It is we get to say our own
prayers and a thing that I added in gosh, it's
probably been it was my church in Atlanta that I
started doing this, so gosh, maybe a dozen years ago.
(26:00):
They're particular people that I'm praying for, I actually stop
right then and I write them an email, send them
a text. Sometimes I call them right in the midst
of that prayer time to check in on them right then,
because I'm afraid I'll forget if I don't do it
right then. And so that has been a way that
I've been able to both connect my own prayer life
but also connect back to the people of God.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
I love it. That's a wonderful practice. And doesn't take
that much time.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
I mean, it's very brief and anyone can do it.
You don't have to be a priest to pray daily
devotions or to call people when you're thinking about them
or send them a text to check on them.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Absolutely well, Lauren asks. We always have our Love of
the Week, which is something we do on this show,
and I can go first. We're recording this in December,
even though I think it's airing in January. But I
always love the idea of stretching out Christmas celebrations into January.
I know the twelve days of Christmas are in fact
(26:56):
starting after Christmas and going through Epiphany and early January,
and that was when all this was supposed to be
celebrated afterwards with Advent before. But I always loved the
idea of like looking at Christmas lights in January or
having a holiday party in early January. It just makes
it a little more fun. How about you, Oh my gosh,
I love that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yes, there are twelve days of Christmas that start on
Christmas and go all the way to write before the Epiphany,
which is January sixth, So at our household, we definitely
leave up our Christmas tree all the way through our
is this the last said tree on the street when
they go out to the curb, so one of those
I wasn't going to do this for my love of
the week, but related to Christmas, I really really enjoy
(27:40):
our Christmas tree has beautiful ornaments that have been given
us to us as gifts, but it also has like
every preschool handmade craft that the kids ever did. And
there's just this beautiful moment of like unboxing all of
that and the glimmer in their eyes of how exciting
that is. So I realized that it's not like the
most beautiful southern living Christmas tree that could ever exist.
(28:03):
That's my mom's tree. It is stunning. But ours is
covered in like handmade paper products and things that are
like losing all their eyes.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
That's wonderful. Well, this is why I got two Christmas trees,
so I can have my fancy one that looks like
out of the magazine, and I have the one that's
covered in handprints ornaments.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Brilliant, brilliant. I do not have too, but I like
that a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Can I say my lesson so we can see your
second love of the week. This is great.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
So I'm sorry listeners because you're gonna hear this in
January and it will be too late. But because my
family is a two priest household, you can imagine that
Christmas is really busy for us. So we decided when
we had our first kid twelve years ago that we
were going to make a big deal of the season
of Advent, that season where we're getting ready for Jesus.
And so it started out just as like, there's four candles,
(28:55):
and you light a candle each week. So by the
third week you've got three candleslit, and we would sing
a little verse of O Come, O Come Emmanuel. So
our kids keep adding on to this, and so now
we do a very big advent because every year they've
added like some other little something, and so this year's
(29:16):
Advent is beautifully extreme in.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
That we light the candles, we sing the song, we
ask them the advent question. We always ask them, which
is what have you done to prepare for Christ this
week or this day?
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Or what are you doing to wait? Because that's another
thing we practice an advent. But then they have added
like every advent calendar named Man, so there's like a
cartoon one that's really hilarious. Our youngest has a Lego.
I'm sure you guys have seen those Lego Advent calendars.
Our middle one has the bone mamong Advent jams, which
(29:52):
are incredible. This is not like an ad but they're great.
And then our oldest has a joke book of dad
jokes for Advan and so our Advent, which she used
to be like maybe forty five seconds to a minute,
is now like maybe ten minutes. And then we do
end with the very traditional chocolate.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, of course, of course you gotta have the chocolate.
I was thinking they were maybe coming up with new
verses to ocmo comma Manuel. I'm like, it's long enough
as it is, so I know there's an eighth verson o. No,
there's seven. There's seven verses, but you know I would not.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Put it past them.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Laura, you have to sing all of them.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Great. I love it.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
I love it absolutely well. Lauren, thank you so much
for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Oh, Laura, thank you so much for having me and
Sarah too. Y'all take care, thank you, well, we are back.
That was great hearing from Lauren Corretco. But her life
as an episcopal priest, how she manages all the different
moving parts.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Of her life. So, Sarah, this question, maybe you can
start on this one since this came to you. So
one of our listeners was listening to the Afford Anything
podcast and wanted to ask because the son had been
talking about various personality tests and aptitude tests like Enneagram chronotype,
something called the Vander Index, which I am personally excited about.
(31:14):
But she said, what type of you know? It's all about,
like what kind of person you are within these various frameworks.
So she says, I'm guessing you are both going to
have strong takes on these types of tests. Which one
is ring true and which ones are horoscopically vague. How
do the results change for who are at work versus
who you are at family and elsewhere? What takeaways in
(31:36):
life tweaks can be gleaned from these tests. Do you
think they're overused or overinterpreted or what? Sarah, what do
you think? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I mean, I don't know that I have a huge
hot take on these tests because I think maybe I'm
a little bit middle of the road. I don't think
they're dumb, and I don't think they're the end all
be all. I think they're fun and can be food
for thought as well. I guess I hope they're not
used to like deny people a job or something life
altering like that. Yet I've had some really fun and
(32:06):
interesting conversations around some of these categories. And I will
say that chronotype was mentioned, which is like whether you're
an early bird or late person. Definitely some natural biologic
truths to that one in my experience as a very
early person, and that does impact my life. And I
am a big fan of Gretchen Rubens four tendencies framework,
(32:26):
which is like how you respond to inner and outer expectations.
Not as necessarily a validated scientific tool, but it just
a really interesting lens to view how people make decisions
and response to different types of influences. I also find
Myers Briggs fascinating. Laura can share that she has a
rare Myers Briggs that my husband also has. So what
(32:47):
does that say about me?
Speaker 3 (32:48):
Is my question?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
That I'm just close to all these rare birds in
the world. And my last thought is that enneagram sounds
so interesting but too confusing for me.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, there are too many types. They needed to come
up with a smaller number of types if they wanted
us to use that one. Yeah, I think like anything else.
If you find them interesting or helpful for figuring out
how to best lift your life like great, or how
to understand others in your life, then awesome. Again, some
of this is not particularly scientifically validated, and it would
be sad if somebody was revealed to be an introvert
(33:20):
on Meyer's Briggs and was then denied a job because
somebody said you have to interact with other people. It's like, well,
introverts can do that, Like that would be a misunderstanding
of how this all plays out. I am apparently an
ij which is also what Josh is, and there are
few people in that category, very few women, as it
(33:43):
turns out, But that maybe explains a few things to
go figure.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Well, I love it, and I have a college bestie
who is the same as well, So I apparently attract
you guys like flies and cool with Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, well we'll all migreat to say. She keeps us
even keeled with our weird tendencies come out too far
or you know, even with the Gretchen Ruben when it's funny,
because I would be an upholder in the rubric I believe, however,
I am such a strong question or rising if you're
(34:19):
going to do like with the horoscope things, because I
look at this and I'm like, well, where's the validity
of all of this? Right, so you know, we could
maybe be both.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
That's your IMTJ coming out, that's my high DJ coming out.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
So anyway, Yeah, we think if it's useful for you, great,
if you find this fun, you know, or if you
like want to understand why your spouse or friend or
colleague acts a certain way and this provides some insight
and helps you have a better relationship. Amazing. Let's make
sure it's not used for anything too important. High stakes, right, yeah,
(34:54):
high stakes? Yes, exactly. Well, this has been best of
both worlds. I've been talking with Reverend Lauren. We will
be back next week with more on making work and
life fit together. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com
or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has
been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us
next time for more on making work and life work together.
Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer,
and course creator. We are two working parents who love
our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is airing in early January of twenty twenty six.
(00:48):
I am going to be interviewing Reverend Lauren Carratko, who
is an episcopal priest in suburban New York. So very
excited to hear from her about how she manages her
life and all the things she has going on. This
is our first episode in the new year, a couple
of days into the new year. But I have a question, Sarah.
(01:08):
We all know that you're a bit of a morning person.
Do you think you will have stayed up until midnight?
We're recording this in December, but do you think you
will have been up till midnight? On the New Year.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Okay, to be fair, if I were doing something really
fun that evening, or if I was at a party,
or even if I were with my husband and he
wasn't on call, I think I would stay up till midnight.
But as the reality has it, we cannot both take
both Christmas and New Year's off, and so since we
are traveling for Christmas, we are not work free on
(01:39):
the New Year's week, so my husband will be on call,
and therefore I doubt we're going to be doing anything spectacular,
and I will probably go to better on ten or eleven.
I'm sure the kids will be up.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Though I was gonna say, don't your kids want to
stay up for midnight?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
How to?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And they can feel free to do that, ok But
it won't keep you up. They won't be so loud
that impossible. Probably we'll hear them cheer up midnight, and
that's fine. That's fine, Okay, all right, good to know. Well,
we'll see. I've been up till midnight most years. I
believe very few that I wouldn't have been, but who knows.
(02:13):
Things could always be different. But I suspect my whole
family will be up till midnight. Because that's just how
things go around here. So before we get into the
interview of a portion of our show, Sarah, you just
wanted to say something for listeners.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yes, and we don't do this very often, but before
we start this episode, I just want to apologize for
something I said on a prior guest episode that a
listener alerted me to.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
A few weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
We had been talking about fertility challenges in our intro
and I said something about being worried about a third
child coming out wrong. I use those words if I
waited too long to get pregnant. And we don't script
our episodes, and I have to hope that if I
had thought about what I was saying, I would not
have said that or used that language. But I did,
and I really want to apologize because not only was
(03:01):
it absolutely terrible language, but it was a faulty sentiment,
as we all know. And we've even talked about on
the show before and had wonderful guests sharing how every
human in this world has value and there is no
such thing as wrong. So please, if you heard that
and we're heard by it, I hope you can accept
my apology. Fresh start in the new year, Fresh start,
(03:22):
for sure. Yeah, it's the challenges of a nonscripted show.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
We say a lot of stuff and it's hard to
think through everything ahead of time. But of course we
always want to be inclusive and loving to all people,
and we welcome that and we always welcome feedback. So
if you want to reach out to us, you always can.
Laura vandercam dot com. Sarah's got her information up as well,
and so please let us know if you hear us
(03:47):
say something that you would like us to address. So
we're very excited to talk with Lauren. We have not
had any ministers on the show before, but there are
a lot of women in that career and it raises
its own special challenges of managing work in life because
being a spiritual leader tends not to be a Monday
(04:10):
through Friday, nine to five kind of job. I have
nothing else you usually see, you know, if you're in
the Christian tradition, you tend to see people on Sunday mornings,
so they're clearly working on that day. So right there,
the schedule is different. But of course there's a lot
of things that happen all one hundred and sixty eight
hours the week when you're in this line of work.
So she's going to share what comes out of that,
(04:31):
and I'm excited to hear from it. So we'll hear
more from Reverend Lauren Karatko. So Sarah and I are
delighted to welcome Lauren Karatko to Best of Both Worlds. Lauren,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I'm such
a fan.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, well, we're really excited to have you too. Why
don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I'm Lauren Karatko. I'm an Episcopal priest. That means I
am a Christian minister, and I am a mother. I
have three boys, ages six, ten, and twelve. I'm a wife.
My husband's also a priest, and we both work full
time and we live in the suburbs of New York City.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Awesome, And I'm sure everyone's listening to this, like, well,
we have not had an episcopal priest on the show before.
How did you wind up in this line of work?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I felt called by God. It is that simple. When
I was in college, I was can I tell my
calls for you? All right?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
We'd love to help me grief.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I promise it's okay. When I was in college, I
felt called by God to become a priest. So what
that means is I was worshiping in church on Sunday morning,
and I just had this vision of the priesthood, which
is kind of funny because I thought I wanted to
be a doctor, but I hate the sight of blood.
This is not ever going to work out. And so
(05:48):
I called my mom. My Mom and I are really close.
I was in Memphis, Tennessee. She was in Montgomery, Alabama,
and I called her and I said, Mom, Mom, I
have something I have to tell you, and she said
I do, but she's a really good mom, so she
let me go first. And so she let me go first,
and I said, I feel called to be a priest.
(06:08):
And mind you, I'd never seen a woman priest at
that point in my life. And she starts sobbing, and
I thought that I was in so much trouble because
I wasn't becoming a doctor. But the reason she was
sobbing was she had been praying in her church that morning,
five hours away, and she opened her prayer book and
a piece of stationery from my job that summer was
(06:29):
on the page of the ordination to the priesthood, isn't
that cool?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well, that sounds fairly divine.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Then it felt like it was meant to be. So
that's where we go. And I'm a very practical person,
so I did lots of internships and all that kind
of stuff throughout college to see if this is really
what I wanted to do. And now I've been here.
I celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my priesthood this week,
so I've been a priest for twenty years.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
That is amazing. And like you said, you had not
seen a woman priest before, and in the Episcopal Church
there are ordained women. It's one of the denominations that
does that. But it's still not terribly common, right, Well.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
It depends on where you live and what region you're in.
I think pretty much everywhere in the United States at
this point you would see women priests. But where I was.
I'm from Montgomery, Alabama, and I had not seen them
at that point in the late nineties, and there probably
were to be fair Episcopal priest in Alabama at that time.
I just didn't know them. But now I've seen many
(07:28):
priests And a fun tagline for our story is that
later after I went to seminary. My mom also went
to seminary and became a priest, has lived out her
ministry and is now retired and doing what we might
call other duties as a sign back in our home
Diocesis of Alabama.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
That's amazing. I love that you both felt called to
do this.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
So, I mean obviously said you did internships after you
had this revelation that you wanted to go into the priesthood.
What is the training actually like for someone going into
church leadership and spiritual leadership like this?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Oh? What a good question. Okay, So it's different for
every single diocese, a dioceses of region. So right now
I'm in the Diocese of New York, which goes up
towards what you might think of as upstate New York,
but not all the way and into Manhattan. But Long
Island is another diocese. So each diocese has different sets
(08:23):
of rules and where I came from in the Diocese
of Alabama, we needed to spend time discerning which is
prayerfully considering your vocation with a priest for about six months,
and then we went to a commission on the diocesan
level of folks it's called the Commission on Ministry of
folks who listened for that call to hear where God
(08:46):
was active and present in my life, just see if
I might be a good fit. The other thing they
do is we have pretty extensive psychological, physical background checks,
all of those kind of things to make sure that
we are going to be as healthy as they can
guess on the front end before we go out into
the ministry. And then I went to seminary for three years.
(09:08):
I have a master's in Divinity from Virginia Seminary, and
that's actually where I met my husband, who is again
there's three priests in my family. My husband's one. Two.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Well, I imagine that I know other industries where you
have two people who are in the same industry. Sometimes
it can be hard to find a place where both
of you can do. I mean, whether it's like matching
both as a physician, or if you're both professors or
something like that. So how on earth did you guys
go on the job market for finding churches to lead
as both priests?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Absolutely well, in the Episcopal Church, we're essentially free agents,
so we get to apply for jobs and see if
we might match with the congregation. And what we have
chosen to do is live in major cities, so like
right now we're outside of New York. I'm rector of
Grace Church, which is this wonderful, progressive, eighty family church
(10:00):
that I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit.
And my husband is the episcopal chaplaine and Religious Life
Advisor at Columbia University and also does many other duties
as assigned. But what that means is he works for
the diocese kind of the governing body, and I work
for a parish. So we didn't have to find two
(10:21):
churches open at the exact same time in.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The same area, yes, which could be challenging for sure.
So art Yeah, And when in the of course of
all this you start your family, then, was that while
you were at your current church or in a different role.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
No, it was in a different role, So we started
our family. He wrote his PhD in theology at Emory
and so we lived there in oh, gosh, I'm not
going to get the dates right, but a dozen years ago,
and we decided it was time to start the family.
So I was the associate rector, so that means I
was not the head of the church. The second or
(10:57):
third or fourth in command, depending on how our churches.
I was at that parish and we got to have
both our older two children in Atlanta. They're only two
years apart. And then we moved to New York for
his job and I was job searching, and that's when
we had our third.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Awesome.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
So one amazing thing about Grace Church is that they
hired me when I was six months pregnant, and one
of the leaders at the time said, maternity leave is
short and rectors are long, and I wish that we
had more of a vision for that, that maternity leave
is important, or parental leave in general is important, but
it's not that long in the scope of years that
(11:37):
we are in jobs.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, that you're better off waiting a couple months for
the right candidate to be ready than to pass on
the right candidate just because she's in the in the
middle of growing her family. Well, that's a good point
to take our first ad break on. So we'll be
back in just a minute with more from Lauren correctco. Well,
(12:07):
I am back talking with Lauren Kratko, who is an
episcopal priest in suburban New York. So, Lauren, this is
perhaps obvious for our listeners who are part of faith communities.
But being a minister is not exactly a nine to
five Monday through Friday job. I mean, one obvious difference,
you're working on Sunday morning. So maybe you could talk
a little bit about what the schedule looks like for you.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Absolutely no week, is the saying, that's for sure. We
have most clergy I would assume have pretty sporadic schedules,
but I do work full time. I have a brother
in Alabama that always, if he calls me on a
Monday afternoon, is like, what are you doing? You only
work on Sunday, But of course he knows that I
work other hours than that. So what I tend to do. Actually, Laura,
(12:53):
your book was so helpful to me when you were
telling us about split shifting, and I know how she
does it. I didn't realize that I had been doing
it until I saw myself in your words. But what
I tend to do is work Monday to Thursday while
my children are in school. So that's essentially I drop
(13:14):
them off at seven forty five and I work until
write at like two fifty to fifty five, and I'll
run over and pick them up from carpool, and that's
when I tend to schedule most of my meetings if
I know that it's a scheduled meeting with someone that
has some flexibility, and then my church doesn't need me
to be a priest generally from about three to six,
(13:34):
so I'm mom a lot during that time. I'm running
kids to different sports, I'm taking them to therapy, I'm
taking them wherever it is they need to go, and
I'm helping with dinner. And then my husband comes in
from the city and we eat dinner together and then
we trade off. He takes the kids and kind of
does the night, the bedtime, all of those good activities.
(13:55):
And that's when churches often have committee meetings, right so
the property committee would meet or the governing body would meet,
and I meet with them in the evenings. So that's
generally what my schedule looks like. But I feel like
I've left off the fun part, which is the priest thing.
I get to meet with people. I care so much
about what is going on in people's life, to hear
(14:15):
about their journeys with God, but also what's going on
with them with their kids. A lot of parents right
now are dealing with that sort of sandwich generation of
taking care of their parents and also taking care of
their kids. So I have a lot of meetings about that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, and do you generally have then your schedule b
sort of Sunday through Thursday is roughly what you do.
I mean, obviously there's probably at hoc stuff that happens
on Friday and Saturday as well, but that's generally your schedule.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yes, Friday is both my and my husband's day off,
and which are really hard to take our days off
and not check our email and do all those things. Yeah,
so yeah, and then Saturday is often kids' activities, but
also sometimes there are events with the parish that I
do then.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
And I'm curious. I mean, now, I'll see all your
kids are in school and so you have sort of
that dedicated time. But when they were littler and you
both had jobs in ministry or in training, how did
you guys work out childcare?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Then we were so lucky. We had full time daycare
with all three of our children, and so they were
at the Clifton School at Emory and then here there's
a Goddard School, So our youngest was in a Goddard school,
so that was full day daycare, and then we have
a lot. Right now, I have a very long text
(15:32):
group of great high schoolers that baby said, our boys
at all kinds of times. So they are wonderful and
happy to jump in and help us out.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Oh wonderful. That's great to takes a village. And I
think one thing, you actually live on the church property, right,
so that makes at least commuting slightly less of a
thing in your life.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
It's true. I'm giggling because Laura and I did a
time study together and she saw how many times I
was letting the dog out at six forty five or
seven fifteen in the morning talking to a church member. Yes,
our house is directly in the middle of the campus.
The church is on one side in the parish hall,
which is where we have a preschool, a counseling center,
(16:13):
and also our church offices is on the other side.
So my commute is very short. But it does mean
that anytime I walk out of the house, I'm kind
of on and working.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
You could be found at any time. You've got to
be careful walking out the door.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Sure, it's true. I do spend some Fridays I try
really hard at least once some months to go off
campus and just go wander, wander around New York City,
go do some errands, do things that are away from
campus to help me not work.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, well, you mentioned that you had tracked your time
for me, which is true. I got to see Lauren's
time logs recently. What was the experience like of tracking
your time? Was it revelatory in any way?
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Oh? My gosh, I loved it. Part of what was
nice was I got to see some of the goals
that I had set in the past become real. A
couple of years ago, I set a goal of spending
more time with my friends. I think all of us
have friends, but sometimes don't get to be in touch
with them as much as we liked. And the week
at time track for you, I got to go to
(17:15):
a baseball game with one of my friends. And then
it happened to be the week of our anniversary. So
another goal had been scheduling regular date nights, and so
we also had a date night. And it felt kind
of victorious to be like, yes, these are things we
tried to do and they are actually happening. So that
was really good. And then also work wise, when I timetracked,
(17:38):
I spent time tracking exactly what I was doing for
my job. Was I doing administrative stuff for my job?
Was I doing past full stuff for my job? Or
was I doing property maintenance which was a pain point
for me at the time. And so, Laura, you were
so helpful in helping me see how much time I
was spending on property rate notes, and also you and
(18:00):
the group at Besley Plans Live helped me come up
with some good suggestions for that.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah, so Lauren shared her schedule. She was an attendee
at Bestlaid Plans Live. Sarah and I discussed our retreat
a couple weeks ago on the show and how much
fun we had with that. But yeah, I mean some
of the cool things we saw you were doing, like
walking meetings with people, that's I mean, a great way
to multitask. And you also figured out kind of looking
(18:26):
forward to the week when you could do things like that.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Right, Yeah, that was one of the things I really
wanted to do was move more. I had done a
really good job of building yoga into my schedule by
waking up early, but I couldnt figure out where to
get in walking, and so I realized, through your guys's help,
if I in my weekly planning, looked at next week
and said, oh, I'm meeting with the rabbi next week.
(18:52):
We don't need to sit and have a cup of coffee.
We could go for a walk. That was a helpful
way to do it, and that's actually become something that
I'm doing with my congregation every Sunday morning at church.
I say, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome any guests
or visitors, and then I say, if you would like
to join me for a walk on the aqueduct, which
is the walking path near us, or a cup of tea,
(19:13):
I'd love to hear what's going on in your life.
And I cannot tell you how many folks have taken
me up on that. So now it's like we have
a whole church full of people that are walking on
the walking path. Now it's really fun.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Well, what a great way to get more exercise into
your life. And I mean maybe make even the whole
congregation a little bit more healthy as well. Right, we're
all everyone's getting up and moving. But yeah, one of
the things we saw in your log is that you
are spending a lot of time on property management. I mean,
some of this just comes with the territory. It's a
small church. You're the only full time employee, right, I
(19:45):
mean it's going to fall to you.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So we ended up realizing we
were so lucky. We got a grant, and the grant
the parish hall building got to be the inside got
to be repainted and recarpeted, which was wonderful. But when
that happened, we saw that our furniture was perhaps long
(20:07):
many many years past its best by date, and so
we ordered somebny furniture. And I had made announcements in
church and even put it in our weekly email to
see if folks would help me put the furniture together, which,
of course you'd think, yeah, of course someone would sign
up and they would come help and that. But everyone
else is busy too, and so it ended up I
spent something crazy like ten hours the week that I
(20:31):
was time logging putting together furniture. But what was helpful
about that was I was able to say the governing
body of the church, like, obviously, guys, this is not
a great use of my time. And so we were
able to find someone that we could pay a handy
person to do some of those tasks. Going forward. So again,
timelog very helpful.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Timelog very important, But I think that was sort of
a subset of because then you kept track of a
second week, and obviously it didn't have to assemble a
whole new pack of I can't furniture second week. But
you are also spending a lot of time on administrative work,
which again is not necessarily the spiritual leadership of your community.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
That's right, that's right. And so in the Episcopal church
there are different roles, and if your role is called director,
that means you're the head of a congregation. And so
of course I am aware that being a rector means
I have administrative work to do, but also being the
only full time employee meant I had more than my
fair share of administrative work to do. And so through
(21:31):
time longing, I was able to see how many hours
I spent that particular week with sort of big administrative
projects that needed to get done preparing for our annual meeting,
for example, that's a once a year kind of thing.
But I worked with you guys to figure out how
to kind of plan for the unexpected and build in
(21:51):
time blocks. If I can look ahead and see, oh,
the annual meetings coming up. I'm going to need multiple
hours for admin next week. Then maybe schedule fewer walks.
That's so good. I have time to get that duck.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, looking ahead is always good. When do you do
your weekly planning? I know you don't work on Fridays,
so when do you do it?
Speaker 3 (22:10):
It's true, Well, so you used to say Friday afternoon,
but Friday's my day off, So I do Thursday afternoon,
which I think means we plan the same afternoon at
this point.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yep, I've kind of shifted as well.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
I have not perfected Laura's method of two weekends, like
where you loosely plan and tightly plan. I can only
do about one week in advance.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So well, that sounds good. That's good enough to at
least be planning a little bit ahead. Well, we're going
to take one more quick ad break and then i'll
be back with more from Lauren. Well, I am back
(22:51):
talking with Lauren Carotco, who is an episcopal priest in
suburban New York. So we've been talking her schedule and
so Lauren, I mean, I'm sure you are thinking of
upcoming weekends, not just the immediate one, And partly because
you're planning services for upcoming weekends. When do you wind
up doing things like that, I mean planning through upcoming sermons,
(23:13):
upcoming service things that you need to do.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah, I try to set a time block on my
calendar about once a month to do some of that
sort of bigger thinking ahead visioning. In the Episcopal Church,
we work off of the church calendar, which has seasons.
So right now we're in the season of Advent. So
I did some preparing. Advent is the time where we
prepare for the coming of Christ, and so I did
some time thinking through what would be some preparatory things
(23:39):
that we could do together as a congregation. I did
that about a month ago. We're now looking forward to
Christmas and then, which is great fun. We have a
children's Christmas play where the kids get to pick their
own roles. So some years we have two Mary's and
no Josephs. Some years we have way too many sheep
and no shepherds. But we do what the kids wants
(24:02):
to do because it gives them some empowering. They learn
the story better if they're doing something that they want
to be a part of. So right now we're in
the thick of Christmas. Planning getting ready for Christmas Eve services,
and then in January with our staff, we'll do all
longer look ahead for the rest like that whole essentially
semester January till June, and then in Jane we'll do
(24:26):
the fall semester as well. So we kind of plan
a semester at a time at our church.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Gotcha, gotcha? And how about time for your own sort
of reflective time, your own spirituality. I know that probably
filling that well is something that you obviously have to
make space for in your line of work. And yet
you're as busy as anyone else. You're busy running your
church and raising your family. How do you protect time
(24:51):
for that?
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, for myself, I love yoga. I definitely do yoga
three days a week and more if I can, And
so that's I wake up earth earlier than the rest
of my family. So I can do that, and I
use that time to meditate, check in, connect my body
back to my brain because sometimes that doesn't happen so well.
But a practice that I have that helps me stay
(25:15):
connected to my prayer life is actually when I finally
make it into my desk. So who knows what time
that could be in the Episcopal Church, we have what's
called the Daily Office, where we can pray different prayers
throughout the day, and there's these wonderful resource called daily
devotions for families. And it's like two to three minutes long.
It's very brief. But when I get to my desk,
(25:37):
if it's morning, I do morning daily devotions, if it's lunchtime,
I do noon. It's the afternoon, I do the afternoon
daily devotions. And during those daily devotions, it's a piece
of scripture. It is we get to say our own
prayers and a thing that I added in gosh, it's
probably been it was my church in Atlanta that I
started doing this, so gosh, maybe a dozen years ago.
(26:00):
They're particular people that I'm praying for, I actually stop
right then and I write them an email, send them
a text. Sometimes I call them right in the midst
of that prayer time to check in on them right then,
because I'm afraid I'll forget if I don't do it
right then. And so that has been a way that
I've been able to both connect my own prayer life
but also connect back to the people of God.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
I love it. That's a wonderful practice. And doesn't take
that much time.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
I mean, it's very brief and anyone can do it.
You don't have to be a priest to pray daily
devotions or to call people when you're thinking about them
or send them a text to check on them.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Absolutely well, Lauren asks. We always have our Love of
the Week, which is something we do on this show,
and I can go first. We're recording this in December,
even though I think it's airing in January. But I
always love the idea of stretching out Christmas celebrations into January.
I know the twelve days of Christmas are in fact
(26:56):
starting after Christmas and going through Epiphany and early January,
and that was when all this was supposed to be
celebrated afterwards with Advent before. But I always loved the
idea of like looking at Christmas lights in January or
having a holiday party in early January. It just makes
it a little more fun. How about you, Oh my gosh,
I love that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yes, there are twelve days of Christmas that start on
Christmas and go all the way to write before the Epiphany,
which is January sixth, So at our household, we definitely
leave up our Christmas tree all the way through our
is this the last said tree on the street when
they go out to the curb, so one of those
I wasn't going to do this for my love of
the week, but related to Christmas, I really really enjoy
(27:40):
our Christmas tree has beautiful ornaments that have been given
us to us as gifts, but it also has like
every preschool handmade craft that the kids ever did. And
there's just this beautiful moment of like unboxing all of
that and the glimmer in their eyes of how exciting
that is. So I realized that it's not like the
most beautiful southern living Christmas tree that could ever exist.
(28:03):
That's my mom's tree. It is stunning. But ours is
covered in like handmade paper products and things that are
like losing all their eyes.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
That's wonderful. Well, this is why I got two Christmas trees,
so I can have my fancy one that looks like
out of the magazine, and I have the one that's
covered in handprints ornaments.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Brilliant, brilliant. I do not have too, but I like
that a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Can I say my lesson so we can see your
second love of the week. This is great.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
So I'm sorry listeners because you're gonna hear this in
January and it will be too late. But because my
family is a two priest household, you can imagine that
Christmas is really busy for us. So we decided when
we had our first kid twelve years ago that we
were going to make a big deal of the season
of Advent, that season where we're getting ready for Jesus.
And so it started out just as like, there's four candles,
(28:55):
and you light a candle each week. So by the
third week you've got three candleslit, and we would sing
a little verse of O Come, O Come Emmanuel. So
our kids keep adding on to this, and so now
we do a very big advent because every year they've
added like some other little something, and so this year's
(29:16):
Advent is beautifully extreme in.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
That we light the candles, we sing the song, we
ask them the advent question. We always ask them, which
is what have you done to prepare for Christ this
week or this day?
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Or what are you doing to wait? Because that's another
thing we practice an advent. But then they have added
like every advent calendar named Man, so there's like a
cartoon one that's really hilarious. Our youngest has a Lego.
I'm sure you guys have seen those Lego Advent calendars.
Our middle one has the bone mamong Advent jams, which
(29:52):
are incredible. This is not like an ad but they're great.
And then our oldest has a joke book of dad
jokes for Advan and so our Advent, which she used
to be like maybe forty five seconds to a minute,
is now like maybe ten minutes. And then we do
end with the very traditional chocolate.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, of course, of course you gotta have the chocolate.
I was thinking they were maybe coming up with new
verses to ocmo comma Manuel. I'm like, it's long enough
as it is, so I know there's an eighth verson o. No,
there's seven. There's seven verses, but you know I would not.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Put it past them.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Laura, you have to sing all of them.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Great. I love it.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
I love it absolutely well. Lauren, thank you so much
for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Oh, Laura, thank you so much for having me and
Sarah too. Y'all take care, thank you, well, we are back.
That was great hearing from Lauren Corretco. But her life
as an episcopal priest, how she manages all the different
moving parts.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Of her life. So, Sarah, this question, maybe you can
start on this one since this came to you. So
one of our listeners was listening to the Afford Anything
podcast and wanted to ask because the son had been
talking about various personality tests and aptitude tests like Enneagram chronotype,
something called the Vander Index, which I am personally excited about.
(31:14):
But she said, what type of you know? It's all about,
like what kind of person you are within these various frameworks.
So she says, I'm guessing you are both going to
have strong takes on these types of tests. Which one
is ring true and which ones are horoscopically vague. How
do the results change for who are at work versus
who you are at family and elsewhere? What takeaways in
(31:36):
life tweaks can be gleaned from these tests. Do you
think they're overused or overinterpreted or what? Sarah, what do
you think? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I mean, I don't know that I have a huge
hot take on these tests because I think maybe I'm
a little bit middle of the road. I don't think
they're dumb, and I don't think they're the end all
be all. I think they're fun and can be food
for thought as well. I guess I hope they're not
used to like deny people a job or something life
altering like that. Yet I've had some really fun and
(32:06):
interesting conversations around some of these categories. And I will
say that chronotype was mentioned, which is like whether you're
an early bird or late person. Definitely some natural biologic
truths to that one in my experience as a very
early person, and that does impact my life. And I
am a big fan of Gretchen Rubens four tendencies framework,
(32:26):
which is like how you respond to inner and outer expectations.
Not as necessarily a validated scientific tool, but it just
a really interesting lens to view how people make decisions
and response to different types of influences. I also find
Myers Briggs fascinating. Laura can share that she has a
rare Myers Briggs that my husband also has. So what
(32:47):
does that say about me?
Speaker 3 (32:48):
Is my question?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
That I'm just close to all these rare birds in
the world. And my last thought is that enneagram sounds
so interesting but too confusing for me.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, there are too many types. They needed to come
up with a smaller number of types if they wanted
us to use that one. Yeah, I think like anything else.
If you find them interesting or helpful for figuring out
how to best lift your life like great, or how
to understand others in your life, then awesome. Again, some
of this is not particularly scientifically validated, and it would
be sad if somebody was revealed to be an introvert
(33:20):
on Meyer's Briggs and was then denied a job because
somebody said you have to interact with other people. It's like, well,
introverts can do that, Like that would be a misunderstanding
of how this all plays out. I am apparently an
ij which is also what Josh is, and there are
few people in that category, very few women, as it
(33:43):
turns out, But that maybe explains a few things to
go figure.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Well, I love it, and I have a college bestie
who is the same as well, So I apparently attract
you guys like flies and cool with Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, well we'll all migreat to say. She keeps us
even keeled with our weird tendencies come out too far
or you know, even with the Gretchen Ruben when it's funny,
because I would be an upholder in the rubric I believe, however,
I am such a strong question or rising if you're
(34:19):
going to do like with the horoscope things, because I
look at this and I'm like, well, where's the validity
of all of this? Right, so you know, we could
maybe be both.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
That's your IMTJ coming out, that's my high DJ coming out.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
So anyway, Yeah, we think if it's useful for you, great,
if you find this fun, you know, or if you
like want to understand why your spouse or friend or
colleague acts a certain way and this provides some insight
and helps you have a better relationship. Amazing. Let's make
sure it's not used for anything too important. High stakes, right, yeah,
(34:54):
high stakes? Yes, exactly. Well, this has been best of
both worlds. I've been talking with Reverend Lauren. We will
be back next week with more on making work and
life fit together. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com
or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has
been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us
next time for more on making work and life work together.
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