Give us insight to discern your will for us

Give us insight to discern your will for us

I have been struggling recently to discern God’s will for my life. For many years, I’ve strongly believed that where God calls, he also enables. It’s something that has helped me enormously through some bad patches in my ministry. And for years it has been true. Surprisingly, for this incredibly shy person, I have been able to exercise an up-front Church based ministry, something I never thought would be possible.

Preaching has always been a large part of what I felt God was calling me to. Who would have thought that this man who finds it hard to talk to someone one-to-one could possibly preach God’s word to a church full of people. The service I’ve found most fulfilling for my ministry, though, has been Evensong. It’s a much smaller service in terms of congregational numbers: but that adds an intimacy that isn’t present in the larger services, especially as we’re all gathered together in the chancel rather than spread out in the much larger main body of the church. At an Evensong service, I not only get to preach, but also to sing; something that has seemed even more unlikely than preaching. And yet both have been possible because of God’s enabling — what he called me to do, he also enabled.

I still believe that where God calls he also enables; but I have learnt recently not to set too much store by that. Many of you will know that I’ve been in another bad patch with my health recently. This has been especially frustrating because I’d only just started to get some confidence back in my ministry after the last prolonged bad patch. I started to wonder if the obverse of God’s enabling might also be true; ie. where God does not enable, he is not calling: and in my particular case, wondering whether my church-based ministry should be brought to a close.

I’ve spoken all this over with our vicar, and he is keen that I shouldn’t feel my ministry is over, and that we would find ways around the problems my health present. The first thing we are looking at is a system of back-ups. I will be on the rota as normal for Evensong, but will always have a back-up in place ready to step in and take the service even at the last moment. I always write my sermons out in full, and have normally written them with at least a few days to spare — done that to avoid the pressure last minute sermon writing can cause, and the effects that can have on my angina. So I will email my sermon to my back-up a few days before I’m due to preach, then it will only need a phone call to make the change if needed. That’s all much easier to manage for an evening service than it would be for a morning service, and I feel rather strongly that such a system would be wrong to use on a regular basis at the Church’s main Sunday service, so I’m going to concentrate my church-based ministry on Evensong only for the time being — something I don’t mind at all.

It isn’t an ideal system, but it is a way that I will be able to continue in my church-based ministry, and feel less guilty about the times I’m just not able to do what I’m on the rota for. This evening will be the first test of how it will work out; I don’t think I’m going to be up to the service. So, not ideal, but quite possibly a workable system that maintains a church-based ministry. And in the mean time, we continue to explore options that may be open to me despite, or even, because of my health.

I continue to pray for God’s insight to discern his will for me; and would ask you to please pray for me too.

Eternal God,
give us insight
to discern your will for us,
to give up what harms us,
and to seek the perfection we are promised
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Additional Collect for The Third Sunday of Lent
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