Last Sunday my whole family was in town for my brother’s ordination. It was exciting. I cried, not uncontrollably, from the moment I first saw him in a robe until the service was over. It was pretty powerful. For the first time that I recall I really saw the Church performing a rite that made me see what it means to spell Church with a capital “C”. There were eleven pastors there in their festival red stoles. The ordination was the culmination of three years of Seminary study and a year of vicarage (internship) at another church. The pomp and circumstance definitely reflected it.
I’ve been through a lot on whether I think I need to seek a formal theological education. I remember when I graduated high school I said to my dad once that I figured by the time I finished college I wouldn’t want to sit through four more years of school before I could start my ministry. As I sat in that ordination service, though, I really felt as though those four years could be worth it. Still I stand on the precipice of beginning my ministry in the World Race, almost immediately following my college graduation, and I couldn’t be more happy with or excited about the decision to do so.
After the ordination, my whole family (myself, my parents, my brother and two sisters with their respective spouses, and my brother’s 8 month-old son) all went to stay at Daytona Beach for a week. It was great. At times over the last several months I’ve been really apprehensive about the place I’m at in life. To be completely honest, that angst hasn’t always been assuaged by the fact that I’m the youngest in my family and I still feel like I’m figuring things out in a family of people who are already well on their way to building full lives of their own. However, that week with my family at the beach reminded me of the place God has given me among them. Rather than hearing from and watching my family from afar, I again got to live among them and I felt right at home.
On our last day at the beach I stood out in the waves for probably 30 or 45 minutes just letting the waves wash over me. I got to meditate on where God has placed me right now and the way He seems to be shaping me for a life of ministry; ministry I always planned on, but this path to it I could never have fathomed. In the midst of a story that’s unfolding in a way I still cannot imagine, I feel so very at peace and excited about the passion I now have for a relationship with Jesus Christ.
As that peace washed over me in those waves I was reminded of another time in my life when I felt similarly about my faith. I had just returned from FCA camp and told a non-believing friend of mine that I was “completely sold out to Christ”. She said, “No offense but, wouldn’t you have said that before?” That question and the discussion that ensued has stuck with me. The truth is I probably would have said the same thing, but at the time I definitely felt different than I had before the camp. As a result of my friend’s ability to see right through the phrase I had picked up from a Summer Camp Speaker and question what I felt was such a deep conviction, I have since always tried to avoid describing my faith with trite phrases. I stood in the waves of Daytona Beach and, for one of a handful of times in my life (one of which was after that camp), felt a reality to my faith that is beyond words. Rather than grasp at things I’ve heard preachers bluster from a pulpit I allowed myself to linger in the waves and continue to feel the peace granted me by a God who gave his Son to save me.
Not too long ago a professor friend of my encouraged me to “be the water, not the fragile rock”. So often I think it’s my conviction, or my faith, or my life that solidifies me in the life into which God is leading me. I want to be the rock that is anchored rather than flowing with the Water of Life that comes from the Holy Spirit.
Rather than deciding whether I should go to Seminary, or trying to make my World Race experience what I expect, or guiding myself to a ministry I think can change the world, I pray that God would continue to have his hand on my current and would give me a life that allows me to do exactly what He would will. Pray that rather than leaping to a shore with my own firm ground to stand on, I would stand in the waves of God’s grace, secure only in His saltwater salvation.
