Sunday

Well another Sunday but a good one. Hubby was too sick to do his later service so he asked for help - I stepped in at st. J's. I don't know the folks there that well but it was good to be celebrating and even preaching - with very short notice. What was even better was - no pulpit to be sent to. I talked about finding your voice and how sometimes God can only get to you to give you the depth of your voice in the wilderness.

Perhaps feeling cast out is the wilderness but I realized this morning that the voice God has given me is the voice of a priest and a preacher - I can try to be otherwise but I never will be. The Spirit was around, filling in the many gaps in an emergency sermon, using all of me to talk to people - that is right and good. That is who I am called to be.

I should have seen a while back when I was told I had to stay in the pulpit at Grace that things were going to go haywire - it hit something so deep in me that I felt like I had been punched. My identity felt in question - this was not just a question of respecting authority and tradition but something much deeper to how I function as a preacher. Sermons were just one strand of a multifaceted misfit which left me feeling tired and washed out.

Being who we are, using the gifts God gave us, living in community - we have to weave them together. But if we are trying to be someone else, if we are living into an ideal rather than who we are created to be we will be unhappy and lost - this is true for everyone, ordained or not. When we find ourselves in the wilderness then, perhaps we need to ask whether this is a time to rediscover the Holy Spirit and reinvigorate our true voice, not complain about what was lost in the past or believe ourselves to have been robbed of an place in the world which was never ours to attain.