This post is born out of a letter I was writing a while ago. I was suppose to be writing about some of the things that had been going on in our lives recently and I stopped when I discovered I'd been rambling for a long time about something I was struggling with and dealing with in my head. Anyway, I decided its former location was not the correct medium for these thoughts so I relocated it here. I'm afraid most of the people I'd like to read it won't see it here but oh well, here it is anyway in its slightly edited form...
I’m not entirely sure why this is happening (probably because I have so much to learn) but in the past few months I’ve had a number of occasions to recall and recount the story of my life thus far and I have discovered a lot of things through those experiences. Don’t worry, I’m not going to dwell on all of the lessons here but there is one that I feel compelled to end this letter with post here. I found as I told my story that I (at least in hindsight or maybe just to myself) seemed to be coming across as arrogant or condescending or something as I talked about how I got to where I am. I spoke of how I “felt called into ministry” or how I needed to do something “bigger than myself”. I found myself at one point talking to a guy just starting college of how it was noble for me to drop out of college, and another time I was talking to a contractor about how I left my job in construction with a great company to follow a “higher calling”. Even the first part of his letter could come across as me thinking of myself as somehow more important or more “noble” because of where I'm employed. I’m pretty sure this isn’t really how I feel, and if it is then I've got a fall coming my way, but it feels like it is how I can come across sometimes and as I’m beginning to see this, I can tell that it is mostly weakness or foolishness or confusion that has led me to where I am. I couldn’t see the ministry I was called to until I was in a place where it was my only choice. I have been raised (directly and indirectly) by people who were so deeply invested in “full time ministry” and they did things like fixing book-binding machines,or caring for sick people, or fixing cars or making tools and dies (whatever that means) or raising kids, but what they were really doing was investing themselves in other people including me. I thank God for all of you who do “full time ministry” without having the assuming, often presumptuous, title or position to hide behind. I believe what I'm doing is important and I'm glad I'm here and I am grateful that I get to do what I'm doing but I also believe that it isn't more important or more nobel or more honorable then what I was doing before or could be doing or will be doing in the future. I think the thing that makes something, anything, honorable or nobel or important is the motivation behind it and the attitude and vision it's done with. All I’m really trying to say is that I want to live the story I'm living well. I want to live it for the people around me and live it with passion and vision to see that I'm on the fringes of some huge work that God is doing and, weather I'm working with inner city kids or African kids, or building nursing homes or if I'm unemployed all together, I want to be doing what God is doing and I believe that what God's doing is bringing healing to brokenness, hope to despair, freedom to captivity, and forgiveness and grace to ... everyone! I don't know about you, but I can't think of anything more important then that and there is no occupation with a monopoly on that work!
