God Can Use Us
I thought surely after we got past Christmas, and the Easter season was over again for this year that certainly things would begin to slow down. Yet it seems ministry is a calling that demands your best all year round. To do it well, it requires your full attention and all the energy you can muster. And though I sometimes work until I feel a twinge of exhaustion, even my best and most productive days leave me thinking of all the other things that I should have done - all the people to whom I should be reaching out and ministering, all the phone calls I should be making, and all the letters I should be writing - all the prayers I should be praying and the really good and inspiring books I should be reading.
I’m just afraid that when I am finally called Home, I will be leaving an embarrassingly large pile of regrets and unfinished business. Yet, before your compassion kicks in, and you start thinking, “Oh, well you do so much; you really shouldn’t feel that way,” You don’t know all the many ways I have of wasting time. And that is something that has plagued me my entire life.
As kids, when my sister and I got home from school, we would immediately be sent to our rooms to do our homework. After a couple of hours, she would reappear, pale, hungry and cranky, but victorious over her studies. And she got the grades to prove it.
And when she announced that she was finally done, it would often remind me to crack open my books and get started. It seems with just a few basic stationery supplies, I could find ways to fiddle away endless hours. With just a pencil and paper, I would draw and color endlessly. Yet, even with all that time spent, my art skills never improved. And having only paper, I would attempt my own version of origami . . . yet I never came up with anything more than your standard paper airplane.
Looking back, it is amazing that I graduated at all. But while I lacked even a passing interest in academics, when I found myself in pastor’s training decades later, it was like I found what I had been searching for all my life! And low and behold, suddenly grades mattered because the material in front of me had meaning! And that is when I finally learned how to study.
Even today, I will be in Christian circles and the conversation will stray to this topic or that, and I will find my mind drifting due to lack of interest. But when the discussion finally returnes to theology, I perk up, and it’s like my sould has found its “sweet spot.”
So as I think back on all my weaknesses and vulnerabilities - all the things that should disqualify me from behing where I am, I have to remember that we serve an all knowing God who decided to place this lackadaisical, underachieving student in this lofty position for a reason. Perhaps it is to show once again how our Father can make something out of nothing. Or maybe, it’s more personal than all that, and He simplly wants to grow me up and mature me before I am finally called Home. Whatever the case, I just pray that I am found to be working with Him, rather than against Him. Because if I have learned anything in life, it is that we should never presume to question God. So I guess I’ll just keep on keeping on until something changes.
Always go with God,
Pastor Ed