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
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