There’s nothing like suddenly gaining insight into your own character, something hidden for many years.
It has long been my contention God called me to serve Him. At the time, the obvious meaning was to aim at pastoral ministry. That was back at age 16, and it was the first step of sanity out of a borderline psychotic youth. Sure, we joke about kids being crazy, and adolescence as a traumatic time for many. I won’t plead mine was special, but I did come close to suicide many times. Only God’s grace kept me from it, in part by keeping me from actually thinking about it. When I perceived I had a calling, most of it became manageable.
The problem was chasing the dream of pastoring when that was my misapprehension of things. So I did all the education, honed and sharpened the talents, became quite good in dealing with people. But no one ever hired me for anything close to pastoral work. When I volunteered, I was usually welcomed and worked hard, but never professionally, as it were. Not long ago, it dawned on me that was the wrong role for me.
I came to that conclusion once I began striving to view the world through a spiritual lens: ANE epistemology, holistic thinking, and symbolic logic. The picture of myself as pastor was missing major ingredients. Once I stepped away from that goal, lots of things started making sense which did not before. Instead, I’m called to teach. That can include preaching, of course, but I’m not pastor material. I lack the proper instincts, and can at best only emulate them by training.
I still dearly love people, and they are a fundamental reason for what I do. It is no trouble to sit and teach anyone anything I know about. I’ve got loads of patience, and can break down to the very basic elements of cognition, if necessary, because I have a talent for remembering the process of discovery — I can remember not knowing. God has also granted me a measure of discerning where the gaps are in their understanding. If I know where you are, I can put it in your reach, most of the time.
I also have no trouble organizing anything I understand, and I’ve never had trouble getting groups of people to handle projects. Administration is just not a burden to me. While I love to present impossible challenges, and try to carry through on them myself, I’m never disappointed much by the reality which falls short. I’m much more interested in the people growing and gaining ground themselves than some artificially constructed goal. For this reason, I despise the corporate or bureaucratic atmosphere, because those are utterly inhuman and inhumane. I never take such things seriously. People are important, and organization must serve them, not the other way around.
The tricky thing is now I must reevaluate most of what I expected to do in the coming months and years. The picture in my mind was drawn with the pastoral ministry as a fundamental fact. Taking that away, I’m now going to have to come up with a new picture. That includes the things I had faith to let God handle. My trust has not changed, but the contents of it. A major element I note already is relative solitude will be more likely. I’m not sure where to go with that, but I do my best preparatory work away from distractions. That’s just one example, as I look forward to what assignments the Lord will reveal to me.
There’s nothing to wake you up like stumbling into the mirror and crashing through to the other side.
