Till All Our Strivings Cease: Reflections on a Four-Year Journey

Note: What follows is an article I wrote for the most recent student newspaper at TEDS, the "Graduate Scrawl."

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“O Lord God, I am not worthy to be here. I fear to fail you, to go through this program without deepening in you. Forgive me for my lack of faith, Lord. May my efforts here show forth Your glory.”

With the words of this prayer, scribbled on a notecard during Orientation, I began my master’s degree at Trinity. Fearing failure. Fearing weakness. Longing to please God but fearful my own inadequacies would keep me from being “good enough.” Four years later, as I reflect back on my time at TEDS I can’t help but think of a well-worn vignette from C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, when Aslan takes Eustace and strips off the dragon skin, transforming Eustace from a selfish, petty boy to a mature young man. I suspect I know exactly how Eustace felt–God has used the past four years to strip away some of the toughest layers of my own dragon skin so that I can minister as the person He made me to be.

Stripping the Outermost Layer: From “T” to “F”

One of the thickest layers the Lord has stripped away during my time at TEDS was my pride in my intellect. When I entered seminary, I saw myself primarily as a walking mind; I valued intellectual ability and rational thinking above all else. Imagine my horror when I took the Keirsey Temperament Sorter in “Personal Assessment” and discovered that I am a “Feeler,” not a “Thinker”! I took the test over and over, trying my hardest to be a “T” while still answering honestly. After all, I was destined to become one of the great academicians, dazzling the world with my theological treatises, NOT one of those “touchy-feely” counselor-types.

It wasn’t until my third year in seminary that I began to embrace being an “F”. By God’s grace, that year I enjoyed community and friendship as never before; for the first time in my life I found myself spending as much time with people as with my books. To my astonishment, I discovered that I actually love being with people, talking with people, listening to people, caring for people, even counseling people. In other words, I found I had a heart for ministry, not just a mind for theology.

Destroying the Deadliest Layer: From Striving to Resting

During my first two years at seminary, I worked over twenty hours a week, carried a full class load, participated on music teams in chapel and at church, ran four miles multiple times a week, helped to lead a student group, and slept an average of six hours a night. I was miserable, but I felt I couldn’t afford to spend time resting.

I resisted rest, fearing that if I stopped, I would fail – fail to earn As, to earn enough money, to earn approval from friends and professors, to keep in shape, … to please God. As hard as I worked, I was haunted by a deep, deep sense that I was never good enough and could never measure up to God’s standard for me. I knew in my head that my relationship with God relies more on His faithfulness than mine, but I was so fearful of spiritual complacency that I could not rest in His grace. I appended a string of “ifs” to “My grace is sufficient for you.”

But my frantic pace could not continue forever, and eventually my body rebelled. I was forced to rest and thus to face what I feared most: the silence of inactivity, where striving must cease. In that terrible silence, I have begun to learn the most basic and the most difficult lesson of all: grace. Following God is not a matter of doing or working hard but of continual surrender, learning to be dependent on Him and transformed by Him – being willing to submit as He strips the dragon-layers away.


Leaving the Layers Behind

As I prepare to graduate, less of a dragon than when I arrived, I am equal parts excited and scared. This “ministry” thing is still new to me – four years ago, I was merely a mind who eventually wanted to teach. I’m still getting used to the “new me,” the one who loves church work and treasures the deep privilege of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep, the one who ministers not just in what she does but out of who she is. I still doubt my own abilities to “make it” in ministry, but I know that God has called me. And I am beginning to suspect that His strength just might actually be made perfect in my weakness.

Thinking Not Past Daily Bread

For some reason, I craved Scripture tonight. Maybe it was because I'd been glued to various entertainment-related screens for a good portion of the afternoon... For whatever reason, I needed something solid, something with depth, something that reached a deep place inside - even though I wasn't sure where exactly that place was located. In flipping through the New Testament (looking for a specific passage - I can't remember numbers for the life of me), I stumbled across exactly, exactly, exactly what I needed to read/hear from the Lord tonight.

You see, although it wasn't in the forefront of my mind tonight, I've been worried about... yep, you guessed it: money. Surprise, surprise. I've been praying and hoping and worrying about whether or not I can afford to continue working at my church as part-time staff, or whether I need to finally "grow up" and get a "real job." Music and church don't seem to count as "real jobs." I long to stay with the church community, doing the ministry I truly feel called to do - but is that simply naive? How do I know if staying here is a leap of faith or simply not being realistic? Lately, normal "life" matters of a few medical bills, needing (?) some new clothes, buying groceries, paying rent -- all those things have weighed upon me.

So tonight, this is the passage the Lord brought to me:

Matthew 6:25-34

"Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. [Ouch!] Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. [Living like that sounds amazing... I'm more likely to fear that trusting my heavenly Father to feed me will leave me hungry. And how does this relate to worldly wisdom about 401k's?] Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? [I don't really want to add hours. Now, if I could add dollars...]

"And why do you worry about clothes? [Because I feel exceptionally shabby lately!] See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you -- you of little faith? [Yep. That's me. I really do doubt. And I don't fully comprehend what it means to be more precious to God than a field lily.]

So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' [What about 'How will I ever afford to pay off my school loans?'] For the pagans run after all these things [So true, the world is full of people working hard to take care of themselves, desperate to provide for their needs and wants by careful planning and hard work] and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

WHOA! Stop right there! "Your heavenly Father knows that you need them." Wow - it never hit me like that before. Tonight, something about that phrase grabbed me - God knows that I need these daily things. All the "But's" I add won't change that.

But here's the kicker, the verse that hit me once again tonight:

"But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

If I am truly seeking after God's kingdom, seeking to follow Him and serve Him, He WILL provide for me. No conditionals here. Putting Him first is all that matters. That is not naivete: that is faith.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!

Amusing Anglican Maladies

Courtesy of my GoogleReader, I ran across a blog put out by an Anglican priest named Tobias Stanislaus Haller BSG (Brotherhood of St. Gregory). One of his funniest postings is titled "Anglican Maladies: being a compendium of certain illnesses afflicting many sectors of the Anglican world, and, of course, intended completely as satire." For any of you who are somewhat familiar with the ins and outs of Anglicanism, it's completely hilarious!

Perhaps I should write a similar satire called "Evangelical Maladies..."

Check it out: Anglican Maladies.

Time for a Change...

As you can see, I'm currently trying to give this blog a bit of a face-lift... So thanks for your patience as I tinker with it for the next few days.

In honor of the Great Tridium, I'm posting a poem by one of my favorite poets, Denise Levertov.

Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seem in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
and wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don't show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,
He went through with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
nor the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not then, in agony's grip)
was Incarnation's heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.