It happened many years ago but it may as well have been yesterday.
It was the day I realized that all that time I had spent in grade school, high school and college study had not gotten me even one inch closer to the yearning, deep in my soul, to becoming who I was supposed to be. I was 22 and I was lost.

I had just spent four wonderful years enduring and even enjoying that very expensive rite of passage that young people go through (also known as college…), and like so many of them I had a degree and a diploma, but absolutely no idea which way my privileged life was going to go. The inner pain was nearly excruciating, maybe you have felt it (it's not just for college kids). My parents had invested so much in me. My teachers had such high expectations for me. My friends were already leaping and bounding way ahead of me. The pressure was numbing, as there I sat, working in a travel agency, not to fulfill my dream, but to help an ambitious and entrepreneurial friend fulfill his. I had no idea what my dream was.

So in the midst of my lostness I cried out to God, as if a character in the Psalms. I protested to a God whose attention I was incessantly trying to capture: “This is too much,” I remember saying, “Where are you? Do you care? Where should I go? What should I do?"

And then I remember very distinctly that the Lord did not come down from heaven that day and sketch out the next 50 years of my life, binding it in a spiral note book and tabbing all the pages. No, the Lord had something else in mind. You see, I suddenly discovered that on that day, and on every day since, the Lord did hear me. And the Lord did rescue me. How? The Lord came to my aid by changing my faith. The Lord sent family and friends who did not pressure me, but gently held me, and who did all they could to come along side me as I figured out how to make my way through the Valley of the Shadow of Unrelenting Disorientation. The Lord sent me quiet times of prayer and reflection. The Lord sent me those times of Bible reading when certain verses just hit you ‘POW’ right over the head, maybe this has happened to you?

And when I went from working at a travel agency in Michigan to a personal assistant in Colorado, an equally dead-end job, I did not spend long in lament. Why? God had rescued me! My newly re-tooled faith had assured me that I had no standard to live up to but God’s. I am a child of God! I am a man on a divine mission!

Jesus says, in this Sunday's Gospel lesson, that, 'everyone will be salted with fire.' How are we dealing with the fires that burn and test, be they vocation, sickness or loss? Are we lamenting in the face value of them, or are we looking deeper, where God is looking, at the ways our trials shape and mold us into all that God has created us to be?


Reading:
Transforming Stewardship - CK Robertson
For the Sake of Heaven and Earth - Irving Greenberg
Cooking for Baby