I am a creature of pride.
I dearly love to rest my laurels on what I have done, have already accomplished, rather than prepare myself for difficult work I will have to do in the present. Never mind the future. I can easily imagine some parts of the future: working for TFA, getting a degree from ECU, being ordained. I cannot imagine the nearer, more difficult future: teaching content I don't know, running IEP meetings, staying up late into the night. It's the same way I find myself feeling about fiction: I love the beginning of a book more than the end. I like to have more books than I possibly have time to read (and graduate school encouraged me in this!). I prefer potential energy to sustained effort. It isn't at all the case that I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather be a matchhead than ashes!
When I was in high school, I thought of myself as a counselor. Endless patience, untold wisdom, slow to speak and quick to listen. I am not so patient now, for I have a much higher opinion of myself, a more inflated view of my self-worth. I am much more important to me than I ever was then. Is it ironic that this should be a product of other's generous investment of love in me?
What draws me most into ministry now is the task of preaching. Boy, do I think I have an awful lot to say! And yet, my experience of preaching is that yes, I do. I have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the preaching I have been privileged to perform. Many have seen in me a gift and cared enough to name it to my soul, supporting my self-worth but inflating my pride. Oh, how vain I am! Who shall rescue me from this body of sin?
Like Paul, I know the answer. Yet I have not achieved it. Nor can I.
I brought up preaching because I believe that I have much to say. My dad first pointed this out to me when he told me I was like a sponge: I've been soaking this stuff in for so long that now it will come out in a veritable wave. I do have a lot to say... to myself.
My own preaching exercises a powerful hold over my own imagination. Surely, pride is wrapped up in that, but it has come as an unbidden dream on a regular basis. Even in high school, when I was certain I was not called - because I had never heard the voice of one calling - I still imagined myself preaching. What drove that dream was the one that drove my patience as well: I wanted other people to be happy. I wanted them to feel loved... by me? By God. I wanted to love God.
When I preach, I find out I do love God. I experience the pull of God's love into the love of Father for Son, caught up in that mystic sweet communion on interpenetrating, mysterious, hold-nothing-back fully-knowing-fully-known love. It is a grace that stays with me: remembering my Advent sermon - there is a love stronger than death! - still has the power to bring me to tears. So too does asking the question "How do you say goodbye?"
But now I need strength. I need self-emptying grace. I need, more than anything, humility and patience. And courage. I need, to quote myself again, the fully human power that Jesus showed us from the cross: the power to rush headlong into darkness and death for the sake of others.
I can imagine an ending because the end is when I can make sense again.
I need grace for the present because it is, of course, not about me at all.
