calling, monday

Monday, August 3

Opening Prayer: Steer the ship of my life, good Lord, to your quiet harbour, where I can be safe from the storms of sin and conflict. Show me the course I should take. Renew in me the gift of discernment, so that I can always see the right direction in which I should go. And give me the strength and the courage to choose the right course, even when the sea is rough and the waves are high, knowing that through enduring hardship and danger in your name we shall find comfort and peace. ~Basil of Caesarea

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:1-19

Journal: Who has God formed you to be?  What has he formed you to do?  What do you think is his calling on your life?  What distracts or prevents you from being/doing that?

Reflection:

 

     When we are younger and are wrestling with choices about the future, we are very often asked, and ask ourselves:  “What are you going to do when you grow up?”  It is the wrong question.  What we are going to do is not who we are.

     When it was time for me to make choices, I should have been wrestling with another question.  I should have been asking, “Who am I going to be when I grow up?”  What I then went on to do with that should have been a reflection of who I was to be, a reflection of the word that was whispered into me.  I should have been looking for work to do that would sustain and nurture who I am (who I be, if you will).  I was then, and am still, the only person on earth who has any clue at all what was whispered into me in the depths of my mother’s womb.  Everyone else is just guessing, and their guesses are a lot less well informed than mine.  God whispered the word Robert into me, and no one else.  If I cannot hear that word, no one can.  If I do not hear that word, no one will.  If I do hear it and fail to act upon it, no one will be the word called Robert that God spoke.  (Between the Dreaming and the Coming True by Robert Benson)

Prayers

Closing Prayer: O Lord, my God, help me to know who it is that you long for me (and created me) to be.  And then help me to know what it is that you long for me (and created me) to do as a result of that.  Help me to live the life you most deeply long for me to live.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen.