In Search of Wisdom

At a transforming moment in her life, Ruth Haley Barton was told: “You are like a jar of river water all shaken up. What you need is to sit still long enough that the sediment can settle and the water can become clear” (Invitation to Solitude and Silence, p. 29). Ruth is now a spiritual director, teacher and author who invites others into the presence of God.

In some ways, I am not a noise-needing person. I don’t have a stream of music entering my ears while I read; I don’t need the television on in the background of the rest of life. Even so, there is a noise inside me – present even on my early morning walks and as I’m falling asleep at night – a noise that is not unlike stirred up river water. Time and again, I need to hear the call, the invitation, to silence… so that the sediment can settle and I can see more clearly and hear more clearly the love and the voice of the Shepherd.

This past Saturday, several discerners gathered at Calvin Seminary for a Discerning Your Calling conversation. I included 30 minutes of silence in the five hour event. As I read through the evaluations of the event, it became clear that the silence was a very important part of the retreat – and that the participants wanted even more. More silence. More solitude. Even if we don’t take the initiative to carve out a time of silence in our daily spiritual walk, we crave it! And when we get a taste, we want more.

How has silence played a role in your search for truth and for God?

Tags: Spiritual Disciplines, Books 1 Comment »

I started seminary when I was 23 years old. Newly married, kid-less, and with a husband bringing in a Christian school teacher’s salary, we had just enough to make it month to month. Taking on a seminary education did not involve huge personal or financial sacrifice for me.

I am now 31 years old – and in the last eight years, I’ve met so many people who have given up a host of family, friend, and church connections and a financially padded standard of living in order to train for the ministry. They’ve made difficult decisions and sacrifices that have left them lonely and poor and have taxed their spouses and children.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing tells us that

God will never disappoint those who truly abandon worldly concerns to dedicate themselves to him. You can be certain of this: he will provide one of two things for his friends. Either they will receive an abundance of all they need or he will give them the physical stamina and a patient heart to endure it. (Chapter 23)

I have seen one of these two things happen for many of God’s friends. Their stories are encouragements – testimonies to God’s faithfulness.

But I have also encountered many who have decided not to make the sacrifices. I honor their decisions. Who am I to say, from personal experience, that these sacrifices can or should be made? How difficult it must be to uproot, to let go of the paycheck, to tear children away from their schools, to take a spouse away from their work. These are legitimate connections - many of which don’t necessarily fall into the category of ‘worldly concerns’ – that keep people from entering the path to a new calling.

And yet, perhaps some of you who are weighing the sacrifice may find hope in these words from The Cloud. ‘Practical’ concerns are very much a part of the discernment process – they’re part of the spiritual journey – God cares about them. Your heavenly Father knows what you need… “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

Can I get a witness?

Tags: Books, Call to Ministry, Decisions 1 Comment »

As Doug so helpfully pointed it out in his comment on the last post, mentors are an invaluable source in the discernment process.

I am constantly blessed by the presence of mentors in my life. I have a vocational mentor, a spiritual director, and several spiritual companions who keep asking the deeper questions and who keep listening to the deeper tones of my life. And of course there are the mentors who come to us from across the years and miles in the form of their writing.

Keith Anderson and Randy Reese in their book, Spiritual Mentoring, cite Richard Baxter:

Writing to … Puritans in 1656, [Baxter] listed four groups of people who needed special attention: the immature, those with particular corruption, declining Christians and the strong. The last group, he declared, needed the greatest care. (p. 25)

Who among us has not benefited from the wisdom of others as we’ve discerned our callings in life? Sometimes it takes humility for us to receive this kind of care – and when we are feeling particularly strong, perhaps this is when we are the most weak, and the most in need of the deeper question from a mentor – the longer silence in the presence of a spiritual companion – so that our life may speak, so that the Spirit may speak.

And for those of us who are called to be mentors, Anderson and Reese offer these centering principles:

There will be three primary themes or empowerments you will watch for in order to develop the ever-unfolding story of your friend’s life: intimacy with God, ultimate identity as a beloved child of God and a unique voice for kingdom responsibility. (p. 29)

How has the ministry of a mentor impacted your life? Or as someone who also mentors, what have you found to be the greatest joys and challenges of this glad task?

Tags: Mentors, Books 1 Comment »

The first book I ever read on discernment was The Will of God as a Way of Life: How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence by Jerry Sittser. He said this about God’s will: “If we truly seek God above all, then we will always be doing the will of God, no matter where our particular choices lead us, because seeking God’s kingdom first is God’s will” (p. 39). He wrote this in a chapter appropriately titled, Our Astonishing Freedom.

There is astonishing freedom in what he says. It’s liberating to let go of the unnecessary anxiety surrounding decisions about our future. And I agree with what Sittser writes: “As it turns out, the weightiest choice we make is never between two future options –say, taking a job in California or staying in Iowa—but between two ways of life, one for God, the other against God” (p. 39).

Not long ago, a dear friend of mine was trying to decide between two good possibilities for her future. Most of her friends were assuring her in a Sittser-like way that she really couldn’t make a bad decision – that no matter what, God would bless her in her decision and so she should just make one and go with it.

I asked if this brought her comfort at all. And she said that on one level it did, but it some ways, that kind of encouragement was just frustrating and unhelpful. The fact remained: she still had a weighty decision to make.

Enter: Dallas Willard and his book, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God. He writes, “If you wish to know what God would have you do, it is no help at all to be told that whatever comes is his will. For you are, precisely, in the position of having to decide in some measure what is to come. Does it mean that whatever you do will be God’s will? I certainly hope not” (p. 61).

Who do you agree with? What kind of commentary on God’s will has been helpful to you in your decision making?

Tags: Books, Advice, Decisions 3 Comments »

A simple piece of encouragement as you journey through this advent season.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
You shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am…
The Lord will guide you continually,
And satisfy your needs in parched places,
And make your bones strong;
And you shall be like a watered garden,
Like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

(Isaiah 58:9,11; NRSV)

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Have you ever done it? Have you ever flipped your Bible open to a random verse hoping that God might meet you in the flipping and the pointing and spill a word for your life?

Dallas Willard, in his book Hearing God comments on this practice of picking random verses. In this practice…

…we see both the desperate urgency and the superstitious character of human efforts to get a word from God, especially a word on what is going to happen and what we should do about it. If necessary some people are prepared to force such a word from him or someone else. Like King Saul many of us have our own versions of a witch of Endor. (p. 33)

I had an embarrassing experience several weeks ago in which I attempted to demonstrate the inappropriateness of Bible Roulette in a high school chapel. Right in the middle of the chapel, I randomly opened my Bible to a verse (Jeremiah 2:3) and read it out loud. Relatively unbeknownst to the 500 high schoolers, the verse was all too appropriate to the context in which I’d set it. I had been telling the students how the Spirit doesn’t speak. And the Spirit spoke. To me, if not to them. Through Bible Roulette.

I told this story to a colleague. After explaining Bible roulette, she said, “Some people have come to seminary using that method.”

So, what do you think? What do you think about Bible Roulette and Saul’s witch of Endor? What do you think about looking for signs and words from God in these ways? Was Gideon’s setting out of the fleece a better way of getting a word from God? Was his methodology simply descriptive, or prescriptive for our own discernment?

Tags: Books, Decisions 5 Comments »

Sometimes our problem is that we’re looking for too many legs.

According to the mentor of one Calvin Seminary student, discovering God’s call on your life is like putting legs under a stool. A stool, he says, only needs three legs.

LEG #1: An internal sense of calling.

LEG #2: Affirmation of this calling through wise people who know you well.

LEG #3: Experiences that confirm this calling.

Once you’ve got three legs for your stool, all you need to do is sit on it. Don’t look for more legs, said the wise old pastor. You’ve got three. That’s enough.

Are you looking for more legs? Do you agree that three legs are enough? Is this advice too simple? Or is it just simple enough?

Tags: Mentors, Call to Ministry, Advice 4 Comments »

“God doesn’t call the equipped; God equips the called.”

Can we reflect on this axiom together? From a quick perusal of blogs, it seems that this statement has been a source of great encouragement to a lot of people. There is a truth here – obviously. Scripture gives us two called-and-unequipped examples. Moses and Paul – both adverse to public speaking – were called through a bush and on a road and then equipped by God to be prophet and apostle.

I also believe that those of us who face our ministry or our vocation with an appropriate dose of fear or a sense of inadequacy are actually healthier than those who are convinced they’ve got it all together.

On the other hand, I think we can take this too far. This statement is sometimes used to filter out a much-needed assessment of one’s gifts and talents. One might say, “God is calling me to this task, so it doesn’t matter what my gifts are or what I like to do. It’s not about me.”

Friends, your vocation does happen to be about you. God designed you in such a way that your gifts and talents do matter. Who you are matters and discerning who you are is part of the vocational journey some of you are in the midst of.

Lee Hardy, Calvin College’s 2007 recipient of the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching, says the following in his book on the theology of vocation, The Fabric of this World:

That I am who I am is not a result of chance, a mere cosmic accident. Rather it is the result of God’s intention. There is a reason why I am who I am, although that reason may not be immediately apparent to me. I was placed here for a purpose, and that purpose is one which I am, in part, to discover, not invent. (p. 83)

He goes on to say that there are times when God calls particular people to things that they are not gifted for and to things that they are not inclined to do. But these kinds of calls, Hardy says, are the exception to the rule. If you are called in this way, it will be very clear. Crystal clear. Burning bush clear. Damascus road clear. Without this clarity, we are blessed with the task of discovering God’s intention in making us into the kinds of people we are. Who you are matters. To God. To the world.

And what you think matters to me. What do you think?

Tags: Books, Call to Ministry 4 Comments »

One of my pastors preached a series on the book of Ecclesiastes this summer. His comments on wisdom (and those of Qoheleth, the teacher/writer of Ecclesiastes) caught my attention. Qoheleth writes:

I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven… but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. (Ecc. 1:13,17b, 18)

And my pastor said this:

Wisdom made Qoheleth miserable. Why? Because it revealed that so much in life was beyond human repair. Wisdom became for Qoheleth a kind of x-ray machine. It showed the break in the arm but it offered no way to heal it.

I’m really curious to hear what others think about these descriptions of the search for wisdom. When I land in place where wisdom is – in a conversation with someone, on this blog (!), while reading a book, in a time of prayer – I experience the opposite of misery. I experience a lightness, a hope, a deeper understanding of the world and God’s work in it.

I’m guessing that the kind of wisdom that Qoheleth found was a different kind of wisdom than we are together looking for.

Talk to me. Help me to contextualize and exegete the Teacher. Search for wisdom…

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Thomas Merton collected several sayings from the desert fathers. Here is a saying/story I came across last week. As you read it, I ask you the question: How are insults a path to wisdom?

Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over, the Master said to him: “Now you can go to Athens and learn wisdom.” When the disciple was entering Athens he met a certain wise man who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. He also insulted the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. “Why do you laugh when I insult you?” said the wise man. “Because,” said the disciple, “for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing.” “Enter the city,” said the wise man, “it is all yours.” Abbot John used to tell the above story saying: “This is the door of God by which our fathers rejoicing in many tribulations enter into the City of Heaven.”

So… how are insults a path to wisdom? Are they? So often we think of God speaking to us through people – and usually, I think , it is in their words of encouragement that we hear God’s voice. I don’t believe that God is in the insult-business, but might God shape us through insult and criticism? Or is it only in spite of these things that we grow in wisdom?

Tags: Books, Advice 3 Comments »