Sometimes you just have to sit and wonder. Does God even care about us at all... or is this really how it goes?
Last week I had a few rough days (even before the stupid Facebook fiasco - for those aware of that). I feel like aside from a few years when I was working in paid ministry, I've struggled with this sense of "calling from God" - for lack of a better way to put.
I mentioned the other day watching the movie 'Nomadland.' As I watched this story unfold of people struggling through their existence, I felt a tug on my heart. Like maybe this is it. My calling. Not necessarily people living this type of nomadic life, but there are all kinds of people out there who feel they don't belong here. I am one of them, and I feel it is that kindred connection that makes me think I can't NOT do something.
Of course, as soon as I start to think thoughts like that, something inevitably happens that pulls the rug right out from under me. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know if that's God saying, "Dan, you stupid jerk! Quit thinking thoughts like this! Ministry is no place for you!" Or, I also wonder, is God saying something like, "Okay... let's see just how serious you are..." Or, I know, it could be the whole temptation thing and all that. I don't know... I don't... know...
***
The other day a friend shared this excellent article 'Ravi Zacharias, Rich Mullins, and A Ragamuffin Legacy.' Rich Mullins had such a HUGE impact on my life. Maybe more through his writing, speaking, and living than through his music.
I am like Rich. Not talent-wise, but struggling-with-my-demons-wise. I'm a jerk one minute, then the nicest guy in the world the next. I do stupid things, then accidentally do something good. I am hopeless and occasionally hope-filled. The article explains it better. There's also this Youtube documentary: 'Rich Mullins: A Ragamuffin's Legacy.'
Anyway, my friend who shared the article used this quote from Rich (from the article):
“There’s a place where my greatest joy and the world’s greatest need meet, and that, Frederick Buechner would say, was your calling. And I think that’s a pretty good definition of a calling.How do you know when God is calling you? Well I don’t know, in my own life I think that for years I tried to avoid loneliness, because it hurts to feel lonely. Now I’m beginning to recognize that maybe that’s what it feels like when God calls me.Maybe when God is calling, it hurts.Maybe when God calls us, it feels like a pain.And for years in my own life, I tried to drown that pain.I tried to avoid that pain.I tried to fill that ache with all kinds of what I can now look back on and see was a lot of stuff that was destroying me, corrupting me.And to listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness that we have in our own lives.And rather than always trying to drown out that feeling of emptiness, instead of always trying to fill it with a lot of junk, to allow that to be a door through which we go to meet God.And this is where I think moral purity begins to play in, that almost everything that corrupts us is something we use to fill some kind of ache, some kind of emptiness.And moral purity might be nothing more than a call to accept the ache and to accept the emptiness, and to allow ourselves to go through that to where God is calling us to go.And the joy of the Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we’re going to encounter because we’re human, is ultimately met in Christ, and that everything that we try to fill it with that is not Christ will never really fill it.”
Let my cry reach you, Lord;
help
me understand according to what you’ve said.
Let my request for grace come before you;
deliver
me according to your promise!
No comments:
Post a Comment