No greener grass

It's very easy to fall into the trap of believing that one's ministry would succeed if only you could find the right situation. If only you could find the church or organisation that best suited your gifts and skills. The problem is that you can waste an awful lot of time thinking about how much better it could be somewhere else.

The problem is that you can't stop it happening, but you can choose your response when it does. You can choose how you deal with the frustrations of failure and log-jams of inertia that regularly arise in the life-cycle of the church. 

Jon Ortberg wrote a piece recently that reflects on two agricultural metaphors that Jesus used and their application to ministry. The first metaphor he considers is: "Put your hand to the plough and don't look back". He says this about it:

I have been doing that in my ministry. I have had an extremely strong conviction that I am to follow my calling in the place where I am and not waste energy thinking about other possibilities. I'm convinced I will grow in ways I would not otherwise if I put my hand to the plow and don't look back.

Fancy that, the opportunity to grow in ways I would not otherwise grow if I moved. So often we sense the restrictions to growth that our present circumstances generate rather than the possibilities they offer.  

The second comment concerns the way we deal with the multiple demands that never seem to stay in the study or church office. Of this he says:

I can do this. I can set aside the weight of unfinished tasks and unsolved problems when I come home. I can be fully present and alive even though everything around me is not settled down. Each moment I can choose this; I can ask God's help with it.

I guess the simple message here is that to fulfil my call I need to fully invest myself in following through my call in the place where I find myself not the place I dream of being and secondly, when the day is done, I come home (or in my case cross the hallway) and enter fully into life outside of the church I serve. Knowing that this is a tough choice to make, burdens don't evaporate when I cross the threshold from my study to the rest of the house, but church was never meant to consume my family it ought rather to be a blessing to my family. 

I need to remember this when Ally comes home from University and I want to "just finish this little job I need to do."