I just returned home from a weekend of spiritual reflection and renewal with some challenging thoughts. We did an exercise where we were asked to draw a picture of OUR spiritual journey. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, put your thousand word journey of spiritual growth in a pictorial representation. My initial thought was of a wilderness guide who has set aside their own discovery of new lands and wonders yet untold to help those who want to take the first steps in their journey into the wilderness of faith, but don't know how or need a guide and mentor to Encourage, Equip and Energize them to take those first few nervous steps. Naturally I began my drawing by envisioning snow capped mountains, with streams, animals, and a path that winds through and around dangers and wonders alike. Sounds simple doesn't it? (actually it sounds like the Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis, Hinds Feet on High Places, by Hannah Hurnard, Pilgrim's Progress by J Bunyan -- Good Reads)
Well then consider taking it one step further...
There were about 20 of us in the group and as each person worked on their drawing with some degree excitement and energy when we were asked to pass our drawing to the right and the person on the right would add their journey story picture to ours. Can you do that? Aren't you violating my story? It was like giving up a child. I know what I wanted to say about MY journey, but how could I allow someone else to add to MY story let alone add my story to someone else's. Of course I then received a drawing from my left and was asked to add my faith story to what they had a already started. How could I? There weren't any mountains, streams, pathways, dangers, toil or snares! It was a different beginning, but did that necessitate a different ending? So I began to add them, mountains, streams and wilderness to the storyboard I had been given whether they worked in that picture or not. After all it was my story!
ROTATE!
We switched pictures yet again, then again, and then again. Over and over again we changed drawing, adding what we could with the time we had been given, blended images and saw in some chaos and confusion and in other commonality and community. I also found myself giving up my intractable desire to draw images of mountains and pathways through them and to force my story in whatever way I could onto what had already been placed before me. Perhaps my story was not so one dimensional as I had thought it was or wanted it to be. There is safety in predictability and conformity and I wanted to control my faith journey and those who come into it.
"If you see every tool as a hammer you'll see ever problem as a nail."
Principle: We add to the story, embellish it, and draw out characters but we do not create it.
The Kingdom of God is a mosaic of such Faith Stories filled with chapters and verses, characters and community, chaos and composition as unique and wonderful as the Story itself. As a result it is never totally finished and certainly never predictable or boring. I suppose sometimes I will be a guide and mentor through the wilderness, sometimes I must learn to be a gardener and cultivate, and sometimes teacher and servant. I suppose it all depends on the story in which I find myself. My story is also unfolding within me.
I also learned that as a pastor I can only added to the Story of First United Methodist Church, but I cannot dictate what it will be or control the outcome. It is a story that was being told long before I got here and will be told long after I'm gone. I can be the guide and mentor I've been called to be in the story I've been placed in and use the gift and graces I've learned in the story of my faith journey that is unfolding, but I cannot make the Church become my story.
I can only add to the story I find myself in, but I cannot create the story.
How would you describe the story of the Church you currently attend?
Divine Romance, Sacred Adventure, Mystery, History, Text Book, Comedy, How-to, Poetry & Verse, a Foreign Language, Classic, Reference, Ancient,
How is God using you in that story?
Hero, heroine, villain, innocent bystander, leading man/woman, jilted lover, cameo roll, servant, patriarch, patron,Email Subscription:
What is God?
Not Who is God, but what is God?
Look at the examples provided by Steve in response to the question: “How is God using you in that story?” Depending on our point-of-view, frame-of-mind, and life-situation, at any given moment in time, do we not see God as being a villain or a servant or a patriarch or a hero or an innocent bystander or a jilted lover? And since we are “created in the image of God” are there not also times in our lives when we, as God, play each and all, if not more, such roles than those which are listed as examples? Like Shakespeare wrote in his comedy “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players:/ They have their exits and their entrances;/ And one man in his time plays many parts….”
…but what is a “hero”?
…and what is a “villian”?
How do we define such words? Do you realize that a villian can have heroic characteristics and a hero can display villianous traits? And how about the servant who is a patriarch, and the patriarch who, actually, is a servant? By what standards are such words as “villian, hero, servant, and patriarch” given an identity. Is it the standards as established by the authoritative Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary? Or is it the standards as set forth scripturally in the Bible? Is it the standards of the world or the standards of God by which we perceive ourselves and define and validate our actions. The Civil War, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the Civil Rights Act, and the soon-to-be-dedicated Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial would suggest to us that, at all costs, we do not want to be a servant. But…God in His Holy Word and through the life of His “only begotten Son” tells us that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must “be willing to lay down our lives for a friend” and “serve rather than be served” as did Christ.
…so “How is God using me in that story?”
First, I would say that my answer depends on the standard “I choose” when determining the definition of each term.
Second, I would say that my answer depends on the connotation which “I choose” to associate with each term.
And third, I would say that my answer depends on not so much “How is God using me” but how am “I choosing” — conscious choosing, life-style choosing — to allow God to us me. I don’t have to be His instrument. God granted me free-will. I can “choose” to walk away from Him. I can “choose” to be His instrument. I can “choose” to do as Jesus commanded, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” when God chooses to put someone in need of that compassion in my path. Or, I can “choose” to walk away from Him as He is embodied in that person; for as Jesus affirms in Matthew, “…when you did this to the least of these, you did it to Me.” I can “choose” to be a “villian” to an adolescent by refusing to condone before-marriage sex when, according to the adolescent, “All of my friends are doing it!” if I know, in so “choosing,” I am a “hero” in God’s eyes.
“How is God using me in that story?”
That’s almost like the question: Where does an elephant sit? And the answer: Anywhere he wants!
Question: How is God using me in that story?
Answer: Anyway He wants! — for “…one man in his time plays many parts…” and, by my choice every second of every day, my heart speaks to God for me by saying, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”
Tough assignment!
Unequivocally, a tough assignment!
My, I don’t like these kinds of assignments! I’ve participated in many similar kinds at the beginning of the school year; and I can say, unequivocally, tough assignment and “I don’t like these kinds of assignments.”
Can’t help but wonder how long you were given, not so much to “draw” your journey but to “think” about both your journey and then to determine how you would go about depicting it visually.
Me…it would have taken me quite a long time to “think”; the “drawing,” because I am not an artist and because I would have wanted to include too much, too many things in my second-grade-appearing picture would have taken some time; but nothing as long as “thinking” how to depict my spiritual journey. For you and those of your fellow classmates who were able to do both within the time-limit set by your instructor, bless your hearts and “my hat’s off to you.”
But with the luxury of limitless time that you were not given and the knowledge of the outcome and purpose of the introspective activity, I, too, have determined how to draw my spiritual journey, narrowing it down to one from among three possibilities.
Going in oder from least to most, # 3 would be a series of pictures with two hands in each. If I were a Michelangelo, each set of hands would be very masculine with the veins very visible on the top of each hand. The hands would remain the same, but the position of one or both of the hands would change: sometimes, the hands would be cupped as if holding and cradling a fledgling bird needing protection and sheltering either from the world or while growing. Sometimes, the hands would be wide-open and empty having released their inhabitant to go explore, to discover, to serve, to love, while waiting eagerly and expectantly for the inhabitant to “choose to return” quite like the father with his younger son in the parable of the prodigal son. Sometimes, the hands would be reaching down and lifting up. Whatever the position of these hands — the hands of God — they would symbolize my spiritual journey: that whether opened or closed, everything God has and is, has been with me from the beginning, whether I knew it or not, and is mine for the accepting, from His hands that are giving and from His hands, on the palms of which, He has written my name.
#2 would be a book with an unending number of pages, the presence of the temporary title “Work in Progress,” and an incomplete table of contents itemizing temporary titles of ever-lengthening or shortening chapters. The first pages would be blank, except for the indication of a blowing breeze as present in C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” symbolizing God’s prevenient grace in my early life. Far from normal books, very little if anything would be nice and neat on the pages as people and experiences would enter the story of my life from all different directions and for varying durations and intensity. Sometimes there would be bumps on the pages as well as eruptions in and on the paper. It would be those eruptions that would be among some of the most meaningful because it would be at those times, that God would seem most distant but actually would be the most ever-present, grace-filled, comforting, and sustaining. There would be footprints belonging to me as well as other people present all over almost all of the pages as we continually walk into and out or each other’s lives and affecting and growing each other in the process. And there would be hands, sometimes concretely and sometime shadowy, almost spirit-like, drawn frequently on many of the pages for when, with or without my knowledge, divine life touched human life and human life touched human life. The unending number of pages would not conclude until I breathe my last breath; but now that I have chosen to say, “Here I am, Lord, send me”; and I am growing in seeing God’s created and creation through the eyes of His heart, I could wish for no more blessed a title of my spiritual journey than “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
#1 would not be a path but a word. No, not “God,” although God is integral in the word. And, no, the word would not be “I” or “me,” because my I and me are not mine alone but belong to the God “Who knew me when I was still in the womb” and Who, in making sure that I “was wonderfully made” also “knows the plans He has for my life.” The word would be “YOU” written in shadow-letters as largely as the size of the paper would allow when being printed horizontally. In the shadow letters with the created-space between the two parallel lines forming the shape of each of the Roman, sans serif letters Y – O – U, there would some unwritten-on space where only God dwelled along with marked-up, doodled-on space indicating bunches of people coming into my life and I into theirs. But there would also be the indication of a visible and, at times, non-visible presence constantly hovering over my YOU, molding and crafting my life to be and become the “you”-nique YOU that I am through numerous experiences and in and through God in order to please Him and in order to bring Him honor and glory. It would also be obvious that the ever-present, hovering presence would not just be molding and crafting me into my “you”-nique YOU but also molding and crafting all of the YOU’s entering the letters in my Y – O – U in order for them to be and become their “you”-nique selves — that “something special that God alone can see.”
However it is depicted and visualized, I know that I am on a spiritual journey, growing every day
because of the Guide Who is setting my course and because of manner in which my life and the lives of others on a similar journey intersect and intertwine with mine. His hands are ever with me showing me how to reach out to others as He does and directing me in the writing of my autobiography so that it becomes a story of “you-“niquely YOUs becoming and “loving the LORD with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their strength and loving their neighbor as themselves.”