:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

Some people are talented at making money. I, on the other hand, have the unique talent of choosing highly specialized professions that don’t make any money.

When I started attending seminary, the typical conversation with my family was something like, “How will you avoid becoming a beggar on the street?” OK, it wasn’t quite like that, but way too many conversations had those overtones.

Thankfully, I had plenty of pastors to look up to over the years. They seemed like reasonably well-adjusted individuals with normal lives. It wasn’t until I started working in a church and saw pastoral ministry up close that I realized it wasn’t for me.

I kept my misgivings to myself and my wife, not wanting the “beggar on the street” conversation to further evolve. As I searched for a new path forward, I realized that the obvious answer was writing full time. This did very little to assuage the concerns of my family.

When I started to pursue writing as a serious profession, I didn’t know any writers personally. How does one go about making a living as a writer? I could handle the part where I pounded out 5,000 words in a day, but the part where a paycheck ended up in my bank account eluded me. I had never seen the life of a writer up close and personal, and I had no idea how to go about pursuing my calling.

Enter writing blogs, books, and magazines. For years I inhaled Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and a bunch of writing blogs and books. These stories of professional writers became my lifeline. When people wondered how I could ever make it as a writer, I received support and encouragement from the stories of writers who kept up the struggle and dreamed up creative ways to make a living.

Without those stories, I would have given up on my calling a long time ago. If I didn’t know that there were other crazy people like me who loved to write and didn’t mind the spare pay checks, I would have been forced to settle for a soul-crushing job that didn’t tie into my passions.

Without stories, it’s hard to know if we’re on the right path. We need to know that other people have faced similar circumstances and have kept up the fight. We need to know that it’s worth the struggle.

As I’ve thought about the importance of the Women in Ministry Series that will be launched this Friday, the value of stories have been at the forefront of my mind. Women who feel called to ministry need to read stories about those who have blazed the path ahead of them. Women who have been told “no” all of their lives need to read stories that tell them “yes.”

Perhaps the most difficult part of this process has been contacting some very talented storytellers about contributing, only for them to reply that they don’t have any stories to share about women ministering in their lives. It never occurred to me that there are women who simply haven’t seen a God-empowered female ministering as either a pastor or a lay minister in the church.

That left me wondering how many women are struggling with a nudge from God that they simply can’t process. Are there women who sense a call into ministry, but they can’t sort it out because they’ve never seen it modeled for them?

As I think and pray over all that this series of stories about women in ministry can be, I hope that it will become a lifeline to women who need models. I hope that readers can share links with those who need encouragement and a few examples of what it’s like for God to work through women in the church.

And then, when a well-meaning relative asks a young woman, who is planning to go into ministry, how she will eat or find a place to live, she can smile and know that she has a treasure trove of stories assuring her that God will show her a path forward.

If you read the Bible long enough, you’ll realize that reading the Bible isn’t enough. In fact, if you learn every story and law and try to imitate everything you read, you’ll drive either yourself or everyone you know crazy.

The more you try to systematically obey the Bible, the harder it will become. Jesus didn’t leave us with a one-size-fits-all blueprint for obedience and discipleship. He asked different things of the various people he encountered.

Some were called to leave everything and follow him. Others were told to stay put and serve their communities. Still others were told to go and sin no more without a command to start following him.

There surely were some basic ground rules in place for followers, but the we can find examples in the New Testament of both rich young rulers who were asked to leave everything behind and home owners who practiced hospitality and generosity.

What is Jesus asking you to do?

The Bible tell suggests this: You’ll need to ask him rather than looking up the answer in the Bible.

And that creates an interesting picture of obedience.

There are the basic rules that must be obeyed if you want to be part of God’s people. Love the Lord first, love your neighbors, and don’t let anything prevent you from doing either. Those who allow greed, pride, selfishness, anger, or any other sin interfere, the call is for swift repentance.

Obedience is pretty simple to figure out since we know exactly what God requires of us in the scriptures. But there is another form of obedience where we hear from God and know what he expects of us, and we can choose to disobey him. We should have some biblical precedents for this kind of obedience, but this is a little different because it tends to apply to individuals or groups.

One example would be Paul and Barnabas who were praying and fasting when the Holy Spirit set them aside for missions work. Some Christians were called to stay put in Antioch, but in the case of Saul and Barnabas, they had specific work that God called them to do.

There were biblical examples of this kind of prophetic calling to God’s mission, but this kind of obedience is far more specific to individuals in a certain situation. God both lays out the ground rules for us in terms of general obedience and speaks to us concerning particular callings.

If we make an obedience system out of the stories in the Bible, then we’re going to miss the guidance provided by the Holy Spirit and we’ll fall into legalism. Some things in the Bible are quite clear, but other aspects of obedience require an attentive ear to the Spirit of God.

As I’ve started to understand the latter aspect of obedience, I’ve found that Christianity makes a lot more sense. I’m not called to be a Paul. I’m called to listen like a Paul, resist sin like a Paul, and obey like a Paul, but there’s a good chance God hasn’t called me to make tents. I’m not a lover of camping and God especially knows I don’t pay close attention—a real problem if I started sewing tent seams together.

The world is a better place without me trying to make tents or traveling from town to town to debate in synagogues. I’m grateful that God has made us with our individual gifts and particular callings. I’m grateful that the Holy Spirit keeps me from making myself and my family crazy.

May we have ears to hear what the Spirit is speaking to us today.

I never knew what to do with my pictures before I got a digital camera. I’d just pile them up in shoe boxes, occasionally sticking some in an album if someone gave me one. Any pictures not in an album were just forgotten in a box.

While in college I dated a few girls. None of those relationships lasted longer than a few months. However, even without digital cameras offering the ease of taking hundreds of awkward self-portrait couples pictures, I ended up with quite a few pictures that I stuffed away in my picture box.

When Julie and I got engaged, I began sorting through my stuff in order to downsize prior to moving into our apartment. I found a stack of pictures with these old girlfriends from my early college days.

It’s not like I hoped to one day rekindle any of those old flames. I was in love with Julie, and therefore the old pictures had to go. It wasn’t like I needed to purge them from my memory, but I wanted to make a clean break with the past.

I couldn’t think of any reason to hold on to that part of my past as I moved forward into something new.

Last week I wrote about learning to match up my to do list and actions with seeking first the Kingdom of God. While I need to take steps toward the things God is calling me to, old plans and goals can still hold me back. Besides moving forward to new things, I’ve found that I also need to cut loose the things associated with my old plans that I’m not pursuing.

I had plans for my life: become a pastor or church planter. While attending seminary, I  accumulated all of the materials required. What did I accumulate? Books of course.

I worked at a church, attended seminary, and read all of the latest ideas and insights from pastors and church planting experts. I also read all of the latest Christian books that caused a stir. I felt that I needed to know what was going on int eh wider church so that I would have a solid perspective on what I should and should not do.

Church planting principles were crammed into my brain. Leadership books sat on my shelf.

However, the more I immersed myself into the church world, I realized that I wasn’t called to be a traditional pastor. I really, really wasn’t called to be a church planter. Heaven help the people who joined me in planting a church.

It took about five years for God to pry all of my fingers away from that dream. In the end, God led me to writing—a much better match for my gifts and temperament. However, the residue of that dream still surrounded me on my book shelves.

I have books. Oh, do I have books.

Books about church planting, church leadership, preaching, and all kinds of popular books that every church leader needed to know about.

I finally realized this month that the books need to go. I asked myself, “Am I a writer or a pastor?” If I’m really a writer, then I don’t need these 50+ books. If I want to hang on to those books, then I need to ask myself, “Why can’t I let go of these books?”

The answer is that one finger may still be clinging to that old dream. Somewhere in my brain, I keep wondering about that old dream. And if I’m still wondering about that old dream, then I may need those books.

Those books are a dead weight that serve no purpose. If anything, they are a temptation to return to something that didn’t work out and isn’t part of my future.

I’ve been learning that part of embracing God’s calling for us means cutting away our old goals and plans that may divide our hearts or pull us in the wrong direction.

Today’s post is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday Faith Jam Series. Check out her post today: To Quit or Not to Quit.

I have been weighing matters of calling, passion, and ambition. I’m thinking of passion in the sense of what I love to do, what gives me life, and perhaps even what I’ve been made to do.

On the other hand, there is ambition. I’ve been seeing ambition as the virus that infects an otherwise good passion or calling. Ambition twists passion and calling into a vehicle to accomplish larger goals that may run these beautiful things into the ground.

We could take a writer for example—you know, just off the top of my head—who wants to write because he’s passionate about it, and even feels that writing is his calling. However, ambition could step in and wreck it all. Ambition could drive this writer to aim to become the greatest writer in his field, negating any enjoyment of his accomplishments and turning his passion into a machine that must only accomplish the goals dictated by ambition.

Ambition kills a passion in the end, even if it promises to bring fulfillment and success.

This is all stuff I’m processing right now. It’s not quite crystallized in my mind. However, does any of this ring true?