This Little Light - Part 1

I drank a Sprite at the movies today.  I never drink Sprite.

I should've known something in me was about to surface.

I've been feeling really conflicted lately.  Like, really conflicted.  About graduate school, about what vocational direction to take, if there is any redemptive quality in the stirrings of my soul that don't include vocational ministry.

I no longer feel conflicted.  I feel torn in half.  I'm trying to zip myself up like a black hooded sweatshirt with a silver zipper that fits together perfectly - every other little notch fitting just right.  When it's apart, it doesn't seem like it will fit together, no matter how hard I try.  And if you take both sides and just try to push them together without the zipper, it won't fit.  There's no way you could make those fit.  They need something to guide them together.  To weave them.  To direct them.  I guess what I'm trying to say, is that God is the zipper.  He's the zipper.  Only with Him at the center does it make any sense that these two ridiculously shaped pieces of metal would not only somehow fit together, but serve a function.  And it's simple, but it makes sense, so I'm holding tightly to it.  Nothing has made sense to me in a while.

You see, I got this ministry degree and was full of ambition and passion for the Gospel and carrying that out in vocational ministry.  Since then, I feel like there's no place for me.  Of course this world isn't our home so we shouldn't feel too comfortable, but I mean no place in ministry as my paid, full-time job.  Most recently, I decided to give vocational ministry a rest.  Stick it in a trunk at the foot of my bed and let it just rest for a while.  What prompted this?  (Are you sitting down?)

A lady at a church where I was working spread a multitude of lies about me to the degree where it would not only tear apart my professional reputation, but tear at my heart a little.  Okay, a lot.  I remember getting the phone call.  It was a Sunday night.

"I just think you should know what's being said about you."

I was shocked.  And horrified.  And humiliated.  And slightly amused at the ridiculousness of the whole accusation.

Stealing money?!  Like, from the church??  Are you kidding me?  That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!  Clearly she can't prove that.  All of my receipts for the church credit card are accounted for.  How could I steal from a credit card?  ...wait, she told parents this?  Did you just say she has told students this???

It just continued to get worse.  After the anger subsided, I cried a lot.  A LOT.  How could people be so mean?  This was worse than the time in middle school when girls on the bus made up a TV show where the whole plot was different ways they killed me.  (I later learned they totally copied this idea off South Park.  How unoriginal.)  These accusations were investigated of course, and proven untrue.  But despite that, I left the job I moved to South Carolina to take.

A graduate school professor told me recently that when it comes to your vocation, you have two things - your skills, and your reputation, and you must maintain both.  Your skills are all on you.  The tricky part is your reputation, because others can try and mess with that one.  It is within your rights to preserve your reputation.  This is your life.  You have a right to preserve those things.  You are worthy of self-respect.  And I must have agreed with her.

Can I tell you something?  I just wanted to love those kids.  Tell those sweet and fragile teenage girls they have a chance at something more than pregnancy at 15 years old and being kicked out of school.  That there's this Jesus who not only loves them, but created them and knit them together so beautifully.  What more could I want to do, you know?  I just want them to know there's something else out there for them.  That there is a place for them in this world.  And that God will hold them the whole way.   That God is rooting for them.  He's in their corner.  I just wanted them to know that.  And I guess I want you to know that too or I wouldn't be typing this right now.

There's a place for you.  There's a place for all of us.  God is in your corner.  Take a break from all of this theological "God is in God's corner" stuff.  God loves and embraces you just as you are right now, in this moment, as you read these words.  Do you know that?  Regardless of whether you're confused or torn doing what you thought you'd be doing three years after graduating college.  God can awaken new passions in you.  He blesses us with desires and talents beyond what we were capable of when we were eighteen years old.  And we should embrace those, you know?  Because our God is big, and He made this world awfully big, and He uses a lot of people to do a lot of different things.

If we went to a restaurant where there were no lights, it'd be incredibly difficult to see the menu and order or eat anything.  If it were dark in a store, you wouldn't be able to tell if the things you picked out were the things in your list.  I guess what I'm saying is as God's children, we don't want to leave any corner of this place unlit.  Whether it's retail stores or restaurants or golf courses or power plants.  Do you know how dangerous it is when places are left in pure darkness?    God is here, and He put you here to be a light.

A light unto the world.