Lasana Ritchie: "Calling" Redefined
What Shepherding Means to Lasana Ritchie
by Amy Boyle
Today, Lasana Ritchie is a woman without a single, defining “profession,” yet she lives with a deep sense of calling that reaches beyond her career. Her life has taken many forms: parenting four children, teaching art for decades in public schools, and, more recently, serving as an Airbnb host, facilitating prayerful spaces, and pursuing a wide range of creative endeavors.
Across these varied seasons, God has been shepherding Lasana in her calling and inviting her to shepherd others in many different pastures. Long before she had language for it, she was already experiencing what it meant to be shepherded.
As a teacher, Ritchie worked alongside the Spirit every day in forming the lives of her students. She prayed over desks and chairs and lived in a way that invited her students into spiritual conversation. As an educator, she was both a voice of influence and a steady presence in the lives of hundreds of kids each year.
Today, in less conventional ways, Ritchie continues to embody God’s calling to shepherd as she “hosts hearts and hears stories.” She sees art and creativity as essential to human flourishing and lives as the “incurable optimist, out-of-the-box thinker, artist, and writer” God created her to be. Through writing, visual art, hospitality, and spiritual direction, she carries forward her family’s faith legacy.
As a creative, her work makes room for silence and reflection, inviting the church into a vision of Jesus shaped by mystery, imagination, and beauty. As an Airbnb host, she prays for and with her guests, welcoming them into spaces where they can be both known and at rest. As a spiritual director, she shepherds others in the same way she herself was once shepherded.
During a season she describes as a “dark night of the soul,” Ritchie encountered God’s kindness and love through the gift of silence. In the midst of pain and uncertainty, spiritual directors in her life offered presence rather than answers, creating space for her to listen for God’s voice. That experience now shapes how she walks with others.
She understands shepherding as “walking beside without steering, controlling, or creating in another,” a posture that surrenders personal expectations in order to “let God do what He wants,” while remaining attentive and ready to respond. She believes that “God’s will has options” and that “mistakes are the material that make us up.”
Ritchie often recalls her father’s words: “God works out what He wills within our hearts.” That assurance frees her from fear and reminds her that “we are less essential than we think, and more valuable than we will ever comprehend.”
For many years, she misunderstood God as transactional. Now she sees surrender as “the hardest easy thing we may ever do.” God continues to bring her wholeness and freedom, gently loosening the principles and patterns that once kept His presence at a distance.
In the end, God has redefined Ritchie’s calling by shepherding her and shepherding through her. From public classrooms to hidden, prayerful spaces, her hope is that others might come to know God as One whose deepest desire is to love and to be loved in return.
For more stories of shepherding, visit discipleshipatwork.com.