confidence, gifts and outright denial...

Life is crappy but it has it's fab moments.
Or perhaps life is fabulous but it has it's crappy moments...

I've had stuff churning over and over in my head these last few weeks mainly about this thing of "doing". I feel like I have no right to be doing God's work, but at the same time, I'm more spiritually content than I've ever been in my entire life. I just happen to be aware of this tension that exists on a different, perhaps more human, level.

A couple of years ago, quite possibly even last year, I was sitting in a lecture on Spiritual Gifts. The lecturer is a guy I have an intense amount of respect for. He was talking about gifts and how we should seek them. I sat there thinking, "I have no idea what my gifts are. God, what are my gifts?" So my lecturer starts talking about the gift of evangelism and how evangelists are necessarily all outgoing and loud personalities, but rather warm and draw people to them. Then he turns and says, "Leilani, I think this is your gift." I remember looking around the classroom thinking, "what...?" We got together and prayed about stuff and he came over to me and said I had the gift of a pastoral heart.

Since then, I've known what my strongest spiritual gifts are but I've done so much to deny that I even have these gifts. Pastors and evangelists have so much responsibility and in a lot of ways, I think that scares me. I don't want to be the person preaching grace when the last thing I feel I am is gracious. I don't want to be the person with the big deep dark secret. My life is an open book for this very reason. But somewhere there has to be an element of "sucking it in" so to speak. I've always known that I'm supposed to minister to the broken people out of being a broken person picked up from the rubbish heap by grace enough to carry the weight of all my baggage. I know that there are tensions in being human and being like Jesus. I know that bad stuff happens. I also know that life isn't easy and it's full of tensions and dichotomies. I know that I can't define the problem of life with my ministry degree, just like you can't with your economics or your psychology or your sociology degree. Not even that simple bro.

So yeah... I've got to get over this stuff. I said to a friend yesterday and giving of yourself all the time just drives you to insanity. Not giving of yourself at all drives you to a different kind of insanity. I'm feeling pretty insane right now. I'm cynical and less hopeful because I haven't done anything "good" for anyone without expectation of something in return for a looooooong time. I need to go do something.

Let's do something! yeah!! I want Africa. I want the vibrance and the brokenness. I want to dance and to weep with people. I have no home. It's neither there, here or over there. So I'll just put my stakes everywhere and mould. yeah!! I want to go somewhere and do something out of the grace that picked me up from the garbage heap. Grace isn't something we have to work to earn. We work out of having already been given it.

I read "The Ragamuffin Gospel" again the other day by Brennan Manning. I'm a ragamuffin, you're a ragamuffin. Don't even try to pretend otherwise. Chances are, someone will knock you off your high horse. The Bible is full of ragamuffins who screwed up big time. Solomon let wealth get the better of him. The great King David was captivated by someone elses wife and just had to have her for himself. Jesus was seen as descending from the great line of David and who else should be worth noting in that line but the prostitute Rahab. Paul, the greatest evangelist, wasn't what we'd call great when he took on the name Saul. Likewise, the world is full of broken ragamuffins who try to get it right but fall short all the time. Story of my life really. Maybe we need to quit it with the idea of "trying" and simply live out of what we've already been given.

I have to quit with ideas of not being adequate: being too young, being too broken, being too lost, being too financially broke, whatever. I need to get over it because essentially I'm mocking of the notion that I've been given grace at all. May such a gift tie me down eh...

With love,
Lans