This Sunday is my turn to do a presentation for the discernment group. It’s a bit emotionally overwhelming to final be at the moment when I tell my story to a bunch of people I don’t really know. I am so happy I didn’t have to go first. But the person that did was a really great person and was able to set a good example for the rest of us. I know that mine will feel and look very different, but it’s nice to seem someone go first.
My struggle of course is letting go to the power of God to tell my story. I want it to be the “right” story. I want it to be told in a way that will make everyone say, of course you are called to the priesthood. Well clearly we have nothing left to talk about let’s just send you on in the process! But that wouldn’t be discernment, that would be a job interview. And the last thing I want to do is “prove” myself.
I have nothing to prove (or so I keep telling myself), but as someone who has rarely failed at these kind of things, I am a little nervous. What if this time I have fooled myself into believing that priesthood is my call, but it really isn’t? What if a variety of things that I hold as truths are just not true. It’s a nerve racking process.
I am thankful to my good friend D for talking with me today about it. I am broken and that is awesome because I am human and God really loves humans. Part of my learning from thinking about my story is that when I surrender to God, everything works out ok. When I listen to my deeper voice, the one that isn’t in my head, but whispering to me in my ear, I know that all will be fine.
This isn’t the first time I am telling my story, but it will be the first time I am telling it in this way. While speaking with friends and family, I often have a very short moment when I am able to surrender and I don’t need to articulate or careful with my words–I just speak. I end up coming out of that moment realizing that I wasn’t speaking. The spirit was. What is true will be true if I allow the spirit to speak and allow my story of broken pieces being glued together to come out and be told.
After our last meeting, I had this thought, “All humans need a little glue.” If you haven’t been broken, then you don’t realize that you are not in control. I have been broken and glued; I am not in control; it is only through surrender that I am free to embrace all of me because: God is with me, God is in me, God is all around me, helping me through the mess.
Please keep me in your prayers this weekend that I may be patient with myself, attempt to prove nothing–just speak my story, and remember that there is no race to win because it has already been run and won by Jesus: I’m just in practice.
Pursuing Call 