Notes for the Week Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany February 9 2020

Dear friends,

The ubiquitous phrase advises to “keep calm and carry on.”  For Donna Watkins, it must be something like, “keep cooking and carry on.”  We all have our ministries, and for some, like Donna, the call to “feed my sheep” runs deep and true.  A true ministry doesn’t wait until life is perfect in order to carry it out.  It exists regardless.  If you call on Donna, you call on her to cook, to feed and to show up with enough food to feed six churches.  She’s a cooking tour de force.

Perhaps “tour de force” is a good descriptor for all true ministries.  A call to ministry, in whatever form it may be designed, is an “all in” proposition.  One doesn’t respond to a call by sampling the edges of it, as if sampling the edges of a pie. One goes for it, wholly and completely.  If it’s the right call, you want more.  If it isn’t, you know in a heartbeat, and you move to whatever it is you are passionately called toward.  Eventually, you’ll find it and you’ll know it when you do….like you know when you taste something you’ve never tasted before, and you know you just want more of it.  After all, there is a ministry for everyone, and everyone has been given a particular gift in order to carry out that ministry. The problem is, we too often miss our God-given gift by practicing a ministry we’re not particular wild about or feel much passion for conducting.  I know I wasn’t called to feed 200 people at a time, like Donna. I was called to do something else, and I thank God for it.

Maybe that’s the answer.  When we can thank God for the gift God has given us for ministry, then we know we must be on the right track.  We enter into that call and allow it to lead us to wherever the Holy Spirit deems important, necessary and in line with God’s plan for the living of our lives. At the end of the day, we need to worry less about what the world expects of us and think more about what we are compelled to be eternally thankful for.

There are as many God-given ministries as there are God’s people.  Some are more obvious than others and seem easy to enter into.  The problem is, sometimes we enter into them because they are there, not because we are called to them by God.   The “somebody’s got to do it, so it may as well be me” phrase is almost as cliché as the “keep calm” one.  We “do it” because we are called. We “do it” because we desire to do it for the benefit of God’s people.  If we are compelled to do it because we know we are particularly gifted and are called to offer our gift for the good of all, then we have a ministry.  If we feel resentful or put upon for being asked to offer a ministry, we can offer a constructive answer which informs about we  feel we are truly called to do.  If we find ourselves reaching for excuses for not offering our God-given gifts, then it is we who need to examine our own thoughtful hearts.

As we draw closer toward Lent, perhaps instead of giving up chocolate, a discipline that is as cliché as keeping calm and carrying on, we might enter into some self-examination about our ministerial priorities. Perhaps it is time to separate the call to ministry because we feel we have to do something, in order to satisfy the world, from the God-given gifts that compel us to offer ourselves in such a way, that we light up the world and our hearts, when called to “feed my sheep” even if we’re not called to cook for them.

We journey together,
Mother Esme+