ASA Closing Show

forgiveness is hard...especially when you have someone to forgive...

here be dragons / the god who wastes nothing

at the edges of many medieval maps was penciled in the phrase "here be dragons." this was unexplored territory and no one knew what was there so they wrote in that warning. basically the message was "stay away - we don't know what is here, it's not safe here." it may even hurt. one author i'm reading says that we need to go to the edges of our medieval maps and confront our dragons more often. if you think about - some one at some point decided to go deal with those dragons on the edge of the known map and found out that it wasn't so bad after all - maybe they learned something about themselves on the journey to dragon land and maybe they learned something about the un-explored world when they got to dragon land and found there were no dragons - (or defeated them) we need to go to the places in our lives that are marked "here be dragons." the idea is that when we sit in our darkness and brokenness - sort of like the concept of the lenten season - that is when we experience God, and when we grow the most. when we face the fringes of our metaphorical maps we are pushed out of our comfort zones into what some have called liminal space. this is the space of God. this space is where God meets us where we are and moves us along. liminal space is that place where everything you know has been turned upside down and you have no frame of reference for anything. some have compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a loved one.

so my first year of "official" ministry has been a crazy one. (I used quotes around official because everybody is in ministry whether you get paid or not) if you don't know what I am talking about - I work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Rhode Island. It is a campus ministry organization. my supervisor and many others have said that your first year of ministry is more for you and your own development than it is for anyone else...I affirm that now. this year has stretched me in ways that I did not know were possible, and looking back i would say the defining word for the year is "growth."

visiting the fringes of ourselves often seems scary and lonely. when we confront our own unknown it is frightening. we often find things there (situations, people, places, memories, events etc) that we don't want to deal with - and they often seem like a waste. there is a phrase in hebrew that translates to "the God who wastes nothing." Nothing in our lives is wasted by God, He is not afraid of our dragons and if we just need to be still and let God take care of the dragons for us. There is a verse in Exodus (14:14) that says "The Lord will fight for you, you only need to be still." The Israelites had just gotten out of Egypt and already they are complaining and being fearful of the desert. (maybe they are afraid there are dragons there) Moses says to them essentially "God will fight for you, just shut up."

this is the summation of the lessons i learned this year:
it's not up to me,
God will use me in my junk regardless and i just need to be still and let God fight the dragons.
God uses my brokenness and fear of dragons in His reconciliation of all things.
I am not God.
the answer is often "yes." (to many different questions.)