You Should Read This

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard (and, honestly, probably said) those four words.  Sometimes my list of things I should read gets overwhelming. 

Our recent enforced hibernation due to snow, however, took me all the way to the end of James Michener’s Hawaii and back to the pile of “books I should read.”

Next on my list was a book lent to me with those four words by my Calvary colleague, Leah, who heard the suggestion from another colleague, Elizabeth.  It’s This Odd and Wondrous Calling by Lillian Daniel and Martin Copenhaver. 

Would it be TMI to tell you that I have had to resort to sitting next to the Kleenex box while I read?  How did these people get my life down on paper?

I don’t know if people who are not ministers will resonate with the book, but I am now resolved to utter this four-word phrase to anyone who dares to mention to me that they might be interested in the vocation of ministry. 

Here’s a passage I swear I could have written: “I love being a minister.  Even when ministry is hard, it’s more fun than any other job I can imagine.  Where else can you preach, teach, meet with a lead abatement specialist, and get arrested for civil disobedience all in the same week?  Where else can you be invited in the the living rooms of new mothers and into the hospice rooms of the dying, and find hope in both places?  I do love being a minister.  I love the agility it calls forth, and the chaos that only Jesus could organize into a calling.  But mostly I love observing God’s presence in the lives of people of faith.  Mostly I love those moments when, from the position of paying holy attention to my own community of faith, I notice the power and presence of God.  There are moments when we are practicing our faith together in ways that have become ordinary, but God’s face breaks in and we realize we are part of something extraordinary.”