....like resurrection.... an invitation; it asked.

Sometimes it takes someone to ask the right question or the same question. Over coffee I shared my vocational search with a local Pastor and friend. After hearing my story he asked me if I was pursuing my M.Div. to somehow "repay God for what he had done for me?" I would prefer to call it a "response" rather than payback, but the result is something "...like resurrection... an invitation; it asked."

I thought having come this far that bringing personal faith and pastoral vocation together would be the next step. But I find myself in a similar place as expressed by Nora Gallagher, "I was meant to remain in the middle for a while, between clergy and laity, a hybrid, a crossbreed, not the one and not the other. An inhabitant of the borderlands, in order to inform not only myself but the church, too. I needed to live out the "priesthood of the laity" to find out how far it could be taken inside the church, and what it might mean outside her walls" (207-208).

lose our life to find it....

You said, God is in the business of transforming people right where they are, and that my business is as much "holy ground" as any other piece of real estate around. Last year "fulltime ministry” seemed the best thing to do, regardless of the Paul Stevens book you loaned me about Christian vocation and ministry in the workplace. I remember Stevens quoting George Bernard Shaw, that every profession is a conspiracy against the laity, insisting that professionalism robbed people of the greatest motivation to “turn ordinary work into a sacred ministry.” So why did I want to go to Seminary

Do you recall telling me that you loved reading Frederick Buechner? Right away this endeared me to you, because I highly regard this author and his insightful wisdom about life. Buechner says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness; touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are kept moments, and life itself is a grace.”

I am reminded of this as I have been reading a new memoir by Barbara Brown Taylor entitled, Leaving Church. Her story has resonated with my own sense of vocation and calls attention to the words of Jesus saying that we need to lose our life to find it.

Eat this Book....

I often experience when I read books and investigate different subjects that I regularly hit upon the same realities. I am more tempted to think that I am reading into these writings somehow, but I have come to understand that "spiritual reading" can be a matter of receiving.

From an early age I was taught to read like most people. I read for information and for comprehension. I learned to distill what I read to basic ideas or depersonalized facts. Reading for information only, I can distance myself from the facts; I can pick and choose what suits me. I may ask what can it do for me? How will I benefit from it or more specifically how can I use it? While admiring good writing, I learn to summarize, glean the main thesis and I make every effort to pack these facts into my brain falsely believing that just having more information will change my life.

Unless I internalize or take in what I have read it will never change me. I have always appreciated what the writer of the Book of James says about this concerning Scripture, “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (1:23-24). In a modern day parable involving his grandson Eugene Peterson shows that Scripture “depersonalized into an object to be honored, …detached from precedence and consequence… perpetuates a lifetime of reading marked by devout indifference.”

In his latest book Peterson draws on the prophetic experience of Ezekiel, Jeremiah and the Apostle John. Eat this Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading reflects on the nature of our Holy Scriptures.  He explains that Scripture is more than informational it is formational. The Spirit uses it to shape us into what God intends for us. In this way we present ourselves to become more like God’s Son. “The book, the Bible, reveals the self-revealing God and along with that the way the world is, the way life is, the way we are. We need to know the lay of the land that we are living in. We need to know what is involved in this country of the Trinity, the world of God’s creation and salvation and blessing.” (34).

Spiritual reading is personal and participatory, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love (28). We depersonalize the text when we read for information or just what we can get from the text whether it be inspiration, instruction or comfort.  We may be in danger of using the Word for our own ends and therefore miss the formative nature of the life revealing text.

"Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: 'Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey" (NIV, Rev. 10:8-9).

Asking God-questions....

A couple weeks ago we celebrated my father's seventieth birthday. There were many family and friends in attendance and I was feeling a little uncomfortable. I realize that my social discomfort was because I was tired of explaining why we had not moved to Pasadena. In fact I spent most of the time talking to those at the party I had not known previously, to avoid the issue altogether. However, I eventually sat down next to my Aunt to eat a piece of cake, giving her the opportunity to ask me about our plans to move. At this point I felt like a recording when I gave the details of the turn of events that had led us to postpone our move. When I explained that we had taken our house off the market after the third escrow had fallen through my Aunt said, “Maybe it is God’s will that you not move after all.”

I responded by saying, “I bristle a bit when people say that.” Feeling that I may have been rather abrupt, I explained I didn't want to assume to know the answers to God-questions like that. She paused a moment and then said, "I understand that, but sometimes we just need to feel sure about these things.” I agree with my Aunt that we all have a need for direction. Fredrick Schmidt says, “We want some indication that we are doing the right thing with our lives, and we are more comfortable having a set of ‘marching orders,' a to-do list.”

This author goes on to say, “The complexity of our lives also lends urgency to that quest. We live increasingly unreflective lives, consuming minutes, hours, and days without savoring them. We rush from encounter to encounter without asking how those experiences might modify or challenge the way in which we live. And we move reactively through the events of a day, making incremental and unrelated decisions that shape our lives without our being aware of it. Then one day we find ourselves saying, “This is not the life I intended” (xvi).

Questions of choice and God’s sovereignty tumble over each other. Os Guinness warns that there is a danger of conceit in view of one’s uniqueness, and that we should “not confuse calling with guidance.” In our culture we are saturated with choice and change and that leads to real fragmentation.

“Asking God-questions ushers us into another way of being, a new way of seeing the world. As important as the I-questions might be, it is necessary to set them aside initially. If we focus on the I-questions, our search for the will of God becomes myopic and self-centered. God becomes enslaved to our needs, our program, our concerns, and our vision. What we think we can or should be doing is fashioned with little or no awareness of what God is doing in the world” (Schmidt, 27).

I think in many of my own efforts to be sure or comfortable with what I should be doing I have often missed the point. What is God doing in the world and how can I align myself with that? Where is God working? How can I get in on it? Schmidt recommends that we trust and embrace the God-questions so we can move forward with a hope and expectation that the needs of our lives will take shape and significance from something larger; from activity that is no longer focused on us alone, but an enterprise that involves and serves others---whatever that looks like.

bound to one another....

I have been thinking about the importance of long-term friendships today, having received a beautiful email, filled with good news, wonder and joy from a close friend living somewhere in Croatia. It caused me to consider how often we track our lives with the lives of the people who are most dear to us.

I am reminded of a conversation I had while visiting another friend about fifteen years ago. We were on an evening walk through the neighborhoods near his home, enjoying Christmas decorations so many people had put out. I remember the lights and my excitement about so many things that had been going on in my life. At the time my friend was wrestling with some difficult issues and he responded by telling me that relationships were often like a wheel. Sometimes we ride it together to the top, while at other times we’re alone heading downward. We discover ourselves under the wheel with the weight of others trying their best to stay on top. Eventually something breaks and we find ourselves riding to the top again, while many of those we love and care for are still under the wheel. In these friendships there is no competition, only a desire for each other’s best. It’s a cycle of ups and downs, or the ebb and flow of our lives.

We had a guest staying with us this weekend. She is another “long-term” or “lifetime” friend. I always look forward to spending time with her; she fills me with gratitude. Her friendship, like those I mentioned above, is affirming, understanding and loving.

Eugene Peterson says, “In this resurrection-created world, we find ourselves as allies and companions to friends, bound to one another not out of need or liking or usefulness but because there are common operations taking place among and within us. We are part of something larger and other than ourselves that we cannot adequately be part of by ourselves” (110).

the mystery of vocation….

On this first day of the New Year I want to look forward to new beginnings, new resolutions, new challenges, probable good fortune and hopeful life changes. My wife read her journal entry to me today and in it she expressed the same desires, but also stated the flipside of things in a most conspicuous way.

She said, “Putting aside the old, always brings to mind the coming winter depression and that everything is still the same; how we are in a rut and haven’t been to church for a month.” She goes on to reflect on more than a few events and discouragements of the past year, not the least of which is a failed business venture, illness, hindered plans to move (the sale of our house fell through three times), and this preventing us from following through with the sale of our business and me attending seminary fulltime.

That should sum things up, but standing out against these things my wife also recognized the countless celebrated and sacred moments of the past year. I ask, why have I allowed the difficulties and disappointments of the last twelve months to overshadow so many marvelous things? For me it has been the mystery of vocation…

About three years ago I had lunch with a friend. I had what seemed like a difficult decision to make about an issue at work and I thought I needed to ask for some business advice on the matter. Like a Rogerian therapist she listened to my complaints until I had exhausted the subject and then I asked her what I should do. She said, "Darren, do you hear what you've been saying?" She went on to inform me that I already knew the answer to my question. I just had to get beyond the obstacles and objections and make the only reasonable choice. She was right, and at that moment I made what has proven to be the best decision; I implemented the change when I returned to my office.

With the business question out of the way I surprised myself by telling this same friend about the dramatic change that had come over my life since I re-embraced the teachings of Christ. I tried to express how I feel; I am redirected, focused, experiencing a renewed joy for life and people. I am a new being, it is a new beginning, I am loved by the Creator and God has given me the Spirit of peace. She listened to what I had to say and with excitement she said, "Darren, do you hear what you've been saying?" I was startled by her reaction and asked her what she meant. My friend responded, “You’ve got the call!” I was stunned by her response and at the same time I was confronted with the truth of what she had said. What made this revelation feel like a bombshell is the fact that my friend claims to be an atheist.

It was through this experience and countless others that I began to acknowledge the mystery of vocation. Matthew Fox describes this mystery in his book, On Becoming a Musical Bear, “It is the mystery that one experiences when he says, ‘I feel I want to be a lawyer and work in legal aid,’ ‘I have to write,’ or ‘I feel called to minister the Gospel,’ or ‘I used to play around all the time until I began my own family and I love them so much I want to do everything possible for them,’ or ‘I must make music.’ All of these instances are what we might call ‘vocations’; that is, a ‘being called’ to one’s work or one’s contribution to life. That these callings are mysteries is evident from the very wording in which they are couched. They are convictions, imperatives, that invite one to respond positively. They bring about change in a person’s life or attitude toward life. They motivate and dispose him to dedicate himself. They are inescapable. They imply in every case some passivity on the part of the individual; that is, a claim that something happened to him (whether by words or events is incidental) that was bigger than he and drew him out of his tiny world into a bigger one” (45).

....a memorable and poignant sentence

A few weeks ago, my wife announced that she had begun working on a novelization of one of her screenplays; the topic came up when we were at my parent’s house for dinner. According to the general rules of screenwriting, one page of screenplay equals one minute of filming. Because screenplays are seldom over one hundred twenty pages and the typical novel is about four hundred pages; I asked how her writing was coming along. She responded by saying she had spent the morning reading.  She said that she used the time to sample the first sentence or paragraph in books of a number of writers that she admired.  This immediately launched a conversation about the importance of writing an attention getting, profound or witty first line.  And one of the first opening sentences from a novel we all deferred to was:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the age of despair, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
- Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

While Dickens’s first line is close to a paragraph, I found that by sampling some of the books in my office that length isn’t the determining factor for a memorable and poignant sentence.  The following is a random selection from authors and numerous topics: fiction, nonfiction, classics, contemporary, business, theology, self-help, etc. Some lines have been lifted from other sources and some may be a bit misleading because of their extraction from the introductory paragraphs, while others clearly stand on their own merits. The quotes are limited to the first sentence and no more.  Feel free to add your own quotes in the comments.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
- Joan Didion, The White Album

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
- George Orwell, 1984

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“How do you tell the story of your life—of how you were born, and the world you were born into, and the world that was born in you?”
- Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

“Life is difficult”
- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

“When you go to confession on Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness.”
- Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

“On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.”
- Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“Wonder is the gateway to knowledge.”
- Sankara Saranam, God without Religion

“I DRANK.”
- Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“My life is a mess.”
- Michael Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality

“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?”
- Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

“When millions of people will go anywhere, bear any burden, and pay any cover price to ‘feel good about myself,’ you know that the unconquerable worm is doing his thing in the Republic of Nice.”
- Florence King, With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
- A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

“My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about who you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.”
- Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

“Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, “We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean that we are going to make a fruit salad.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Budda, Living Christ

“There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid.”
- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

“Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern.”
- Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

“Even in the flattest landscape there are passes where the road first climbs to a peak and then descends into a new valley.”
- Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities

“The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life.”
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

“No matter that men in their hundreds of thousands disfigured the land on which they swarmed, paved the ground with stones so that no green thing could grow, filled the air with the fumes of coal and gas, lopped back all the trees, and drove away every animal and every bird: spring was still spring, even in the town.”
- Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Many of us feel that our faith has been stolen, and it’s time to take it back.”
- Jim Wallis, God’s Politics

“This book is about the liberation of the human heart from the tentacles of chaos and loneliness, and from those fears that provoke us to exclude and reject others.”
- Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

“I used to think that young Americans began whatever education they were to get at the age of eighteen, that their early lives were spiritually empty and that they arrived at the university clean slates unaware of their deeper selves and the world beyond their superficial experience.”
- Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“There are seething energies of spirituality in evidence everywhere.”
- Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

“All this happened, more or less.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse - Five

“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.”
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell.”
- Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin