I am being reminded in prayer (again) that the reason I am blogging and developing my spiritual direction practice is because I feel called to these ministries. I get tangled up in worrying about whether I will be successful or if I may have made a mistake in discerning my calling, or maybe no one really wants what I have to offer (an old voice in my head, the tape of which I sense God trying to erase). I am not writing this today because I am trying to elicit responses, but because I need to be reminded that my only criteria for "success" is whether or not I am being faithful to what I believe God wants me to do. I need to speak this truth for myself and as a witness, today, for anyone who reads this, to the challenges of setting aside all other criteria. Doubt, distraction, fear, anxiety, all compete for my attention with the still, small voice I trust is coming from God.
I believe that God is affirming my call in many small ways, drawing my attention to books I need to read, ways I need to reach out, prayers I need to pray. I also am connecting to a number of people, my pastor, my spiritual director, spiritual friends, other spiritual directors, who affirm what I am doing. I have to trust one moment at a time and keep responding to the guidance I receive in prayer and from others. How seductive it is to long for approval, numbers, acclaim, "success" in the way the world defines it, and how utterly distracting it is from who God is calling me to be when I move toward those markers.
The quote below is one I have returned to over and over since one of my spiritual directors, many years ago, gave me her copy of Evelyn Underhill's The Spiritual Life. I need to read this again often at this stage of my journey:
"Our place is not the auditorium but the stage—or, as the case may be, the field, workshop, study, laboratory—because we ourselves form part of the creative apparatus of God, or at least are meant to form part of the creative apparatus of God. He made us in order to use us, and use us in the most profitable way; for His purpose, not ours. To live a spiritual life means subordinating all other interests to that single fact. Sometimes our positions seems to be that of tools; taken up when wanted, used in ways which we had not expected for an object on which our opinion is not asked, and then laid down. Sometimes we are the currency used in some great operation, of which the purpose is not revealed to us. Sometimes we are servants, left year in, year out to the same monotonous job. Sometimes we are conscious fellow-workers with the Perfect, striving to bring the Kingdom in. But whatever our particular place or job may be, it means the austere conditions of the workshop, not the free-lance activities of the messy but well-meaning amateur; clocking in at the right time and tending the machine in the right way. Sometimes, perhaps, carrying on for years with a machine we do not very well understand and do not enjoy; because it needs doing, and no one else is available. Or accepting the situation quite quietly, when a job we felt that we were managing excellently is taken away. Taking responsibility if we are called to it, or just bringing the workers their dinner, cleaning and sharpening the tools. All self-willed choices and obstinacy drained out of what we thought to be our work; so that it becomes more and more God’s work in us."
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