Listening to Your Life Speak

This past Sunday Mt. Carmel Baptist Church ordained me into full time Christian ministry. Union Baptist Church in West Point, Georgia called me to pastor last April and in that process called for my ordination. Because of a unique circumstance they allowed my home church, in which my father pastors, to perform the ceremony. It truly was an unforgettable day.

During the service my New Testament and Greek professor from Belmont University, Dr. Robert Byrd, gave a charge to me, and my father, Dr. Bill Owen, gave a short homily. Together, the two of them circled around a similar topic that I can't stop thinking about.

They told me to listen to my inner life speak.

Listening to your life speak? To me, this means retreating into the depths of your heart, soul and mind and contemplating. It means noticing the joys, sorrows, loves, passions, anguish, happiness that life creates. It means shedding light on the patterns that our choices craft and defining the uncertainty that life unfolds. There is no real direction or formula that needs to be followed for this process except the willingness to go where the retreat leads.

My retreat has shown me that for now on my profession is helping others in their walk with Christ, introducing people to Christ, leading a congregation by serving, speaking on behalf of God to a community of faith, and the list goes on and on. For the remainder of my life, I will be serving others and their needs. This scares me and confirms the fact that I am completely inadequate for such a challenge.

I know that I cannot accomplish these tasks and serve all these people all the time. I know I will fail and at times upset and disappoint. I carry with me a great fear of failure. This is the part of the journey I was not expecting – I didn’t realize listening to your life confronts you with your fears as well as your strengths, abilities and loves.

Parker Palmer reminds me, however,
We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world.
The wisdom for such a time as this is being in touch with your self. Knowing who you are as a person and as a disciple of Christ is what it means to listen to your life. It means tapping into the fear you carry inside of you as well as the hope. When you do, the darkness of these fears is shaken off by the light of reflection. And we all know that things are not nearly as scary in the light.

Listening to your life is actually listening to the God within you. Contemplating on your hopes, faiths and fears is actually a form of meditative prayer. If we listen carefully we can hear God’s voice. God is loving us, shaping us, forming us and redeeming us. But into what? That, my friend, is up to you to discern.

In my quest to listen to my life I have gleaned this: serving and loving others for the sake of that is simply what others expect will always make me feel insecure and incomplete. Listening to my life and unfolding the journey to becoming fully human allows me to love others with an unconditional gratitude. The reason is because my focus is not what others expect of me but rather on God.

My hope for you is that you will see that listening to your life is a great avenue to becoming fully human. And being fully human is the gift God is trying to give us.

Comments

Karl Kroger said…
Congrats and blessings to you.
January 8, 2009 at 11:37 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Most Difficult Parable Ever

Image
Theologian N.T. Wright finds the parable of the fig tree to be quite strange.  He says, “Jesus' warning in Luke 13 is at once amplified by this almost humorous, yet in fact quite sinister, parable of the fig tree in the vineyard.” And it is sinister.  It’s a hard pill to take.  Jesus' parable goes like this: A man has as fig tree planted in his vineyard.  One day he comes out looking for fruit on it, but there are no figs.  He says to the vineyard keeper, “Look at this tree.  For three years, I've come hoping to find some fresh figs, but what do I find? Nothing.  So just go ahead and cut it down.  Why waste the space with a fruitless tree?” The vineyard keeper replies, “Give it another chance, sir.  Give me one more years working with it.  I’ll cultivate the soil and heap on some manure to fertilize it.  If it surprises us and bears fruit next year, that will be great, but if not, then we’ll cut it down.”...
Read more

The Bird of Dawning Singeth All Night Long

Image
This Christmas I was moved by the words of Frederick Buechner.  For my last blog of the year I offer to you his wisdom rather than my own ramblings.  I hope it does for you what it continues to do for me. Frederick Buechner says in his book The Faces of Jesus: On the dark bulwark of Elsinore, Shakespeare has Marcellus and Haratio reflecting on Christ in the opening scene of Hamlet: Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairly takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time These lines from the first scene of Hamlet in a sense say it all.  We tend to think time is just progression . . . as moment following moment, day following day, in relentless flow, the kind of time a clock or calendar measures.  But we ...
Read more

Sacrificing Joy

Image
I have been told my biggest weakness is I take myself too seriously. I agree. But here is my dilemma: My life is filled with responsibilities and deadlines. I go to school, pastor a church, assist my seminary in their admissions process, and feel obligated to be a good friend. My school takes up twelve hours a week plus roughly twenty hours of study. I work at least 10 hours on my sermon and spend two days a week with my congregation. Fifteen hours of my week is given to the McAfee Admissions Office and every Saturday I play softball with some friends. With this schedule I am up to 57 hours of responsibility time plus two days are given to my congregants. Why do I do this you ask? Because I can. Because God is blessing me in it. Because it gives me a sense of fulfillment. All of these shape an identity for me. And I love every second of it. We are all busy people. We all know what it is like to work the extra hour or sign up for one my volunteer role. We all over...
Read more