Flip the Paper Upside Down

A reflection on Dr. Patrick B. Reyes's "The Purpose Gap"

"Now flip the paper upside down."

That instruction did more work on me than almost anything else I encountered that semester.

Before this class, I only knew Dr. Patrick Reyes in passing — a name that surfaced in seminary circles, an article here and there. That changed the moment I hit play on the audiobook in early November. Every car ride after that, I was struck by his transparency, his vulnerability, his raw honesty. By the time I joined the virtual conversation Garrett hosted with him, I already had a question ready. I wanted him to know my name.

He opened the session with an exercise: draw a parabola on a blank sheet of paper. As we drew, he narrated the shape most people are taught to expect from a life — the incline representing mentorship and positive influence, the peak representing "the climax," "the arrival," the completion of a goal, and the descent as the part where, if you're willing, you mentor and coach the people coming up behind you. He noted that some people experience multiple peaks in a lifetime. That stopped me. I've had a few of my own parabolas, and I pray for more. But I was also struck by how many people never even reach the first mark on that shape — and never will.

Then he said it: now flip the paper upside down.

That was the whole argument, right there, in one instruction. It was the picture I'd been reaching for the entire time I listened to Timothy Andrés Pabón read Reyes's words to me in the car. In Black and brown communities and families, there are young people and adults questioning their own abilities, for a hundred different reasons. And there are also living rooms full of kids trying something different anyway — little girls dancing in the kitchen for their mothers and grandmothers, believing she could be the one who saves the family from poverty and fear. Little boys watching their sisters while their mothers work a second job, wondering what they could possibly do to permanently change things for everyone, but not knowing who to call. The dancing girl goes to a school with no extracurriculars. Why doesn't the system that produces these narratives ever paint the real picture of "the world as it is" for these children?

I bookmarked the chapter called "Hero's Journey So White," because it was written for the girl still dancing in that kitchen, wondering if she's talented enough to save anybody. I was that girl. My talent was acting and storytelling, and I struggled to convince myself — and my parents — that it was possible before I ever had to convince anyone else. I loved how Reyes answered his own daughter when she said she wanted to be an astronaut: he told her to believe it was possible, and then he showed her the how.

One of my favorite ideas from this spring's Katie Geneva Cannon Leadership Conference was that to dream is an act of resistance. Reyes is making the same argument from a different angle — naming the systems that capture dreams before they can form: the miseducating, misrepresenting, and mistreating that silences people's imaginations before they've had a chance to use them. Prohibiting someone from imagining is its own form of violence. "The Purpose Gap" is exactly the right name for the space between the services available to people and the qualitative, human impact those services are actually supposed to produce. The gap in purpose is the missing language at the center of that entire conversation.

What Reyes weaves through the whole book is "the way the world is" — and his insistence that most great things get accomplished by a cluster of stars, a constellation, not a lone hero. That reframe matters. It teaches a young dreamer to imagine collaboration and solidarity instead of a solo climb. He interrogates the word "purpose" itself, and the way adults invite children to dream only in individual terms instead of communal ones. For years, that word haunted me. I had no idea what the adults around me actually meant by it. I can name plenty of authority figures who "spoke over my life" and dared me to follow my purpose without distraction — while, at the same time, the people closest to me had already tied a neat bow around exactly which purpose they expected me to fit into.

I was privileged in a few ways. Even so, there were real restraints inside my most intimate community of care — restraints based on my gender performance, my age, my family's standing in our religious community, and my parents' reputations across their own separate professional and social circles. I was constantly performing an identity. The pressure to become "the one" was heavy, and I wore that heavy cloak of super-girl anyway, because it came bundled with being spoken of among the "right" names — not only alongside my successful cousins, but alongside Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, and Dorothy Dandridge in my family's conversations. Reyes challenges that entire rags-to-riches, individualistic definition of success. And he's right: even the most successful individuals have teams. Other artists, other professionals, other administrators — stars in their own right, inside their own constellations.

So how do we close the gap? Reyes draws us back to community. In one reflection exercise, he has readers list out their own network — everyone who is a phone call away. Stargazing can feel like a waste of time when you're the one standing in the ditch, on the wrong side of that upside-down parabola. I'd push Reyes a little further here, for the people fighting to climb out of that ditch in the dark. It's like feeling for a light switch with soapy water in your eyes. For the one who's lucky enough to find their way out, there's a question that comes before the decision: is it worth my time to go after this light switch, or is it a better use of my time to keep waiting for someone to save me, or should I try to find the faucet first? That last one might not be my strongest metaphor, but the point stands — for some people living inside the purpose gap, the real wisdom is learning to tell the faucet from the light switch. Which one is the false hope, and which one is the decision that actually gets you out of the hole and into the light?

Dr. Reyes uses The Purpose Gap to build language around storytelling, narrative, and "the world as it is" — and around how flattening that world into one generalized story has carved a chasm between how different populations see themselves and what they believe is available to them. When the Zoom call ended and he greeted the room, calling some of us friends by name, I sat with how many bright stars, phone calls, and small decisions had brought me to that exact moment. The book is amazing. Meeting the author's spirit in real time was exactly what I imagined it would be — priceless.

Auburn Theological Seminary's First Center for Storytelling and Narrative Change Gathering — 2024 Cohort, New York, NY (LaSheena, fifth from left)

That Zoom call wasn't the last time our paths crossed. I later spent three days in a cohort with Dr. Reyes in New York, where we each wrote a Letter to the Future — the practice made real, not just read about. That letter now lives inside my own book, The Ground We Become.