Faith Venture

Last summer I attended what we affectionately refer to as Pastoral Boot Camp.  To say I am far removed from the girl, who used to like Girl Scout camp, is an understatement.  The 2” mattress on the wood slats, the sharing of toilet facilities and waiting in line for a shower were no longer even remotely positive experiences.  Yet, God in His wisdom will use ever experience to teach us.

I am always amazed at the threads of chance which run through our lives.  Without much thought, we make countless decisions that move us along this journey to become.  I arrived at the school with a friend from my church and innocently, we chose a room.  There were eight beds in the room and the chances were great that we would soon be joined by others.  That didn’t really matter since we were there to experience the week – fresh out of the car and still unscathed.

The room soon was anything, but quiet. Fresh energy and four smiling faces joined us.  Names were exchanged and beds chosen.  The learning experience began.  Life is like that.  We look for the big teachings.  We spend royally to be educated; but God teaches us in the cracks.  In the obscure moments of everyday, there are lessons to be learned.  I believe the most important lessons, those which form our personalities and faith, happen along the edges of our conscious.  When we start to attune ourselves to these nuances, we can truly become conscious of where God is leading us.

The planned session of the school left very little time for sitting around in your room and getting to know each other.  Our exchanges came in the mundane moments of getting dressed, going to sleep or trying to, while rewriting papers or grabbing our books for the next session.  We exchanged some personal information about husbands, kids, churches and God’s call on our lives.  We sat through sessions and heard bits and pieces of our stories.  In our six days together, we would bond as women do and we would cry to have to part at the end.

Not much for a training camp could be seen in those brief encounters. When I left the school on the following Saturday, I could not have told you how effected I was by the interaction, aside from the fact I was glad to get back to my private bath and my own bed.

Yet, I find myself, some nine months later, still reflecting on the experience and rewriting this page I wrote in the wee hours of a Sunday morning a week after.  Within those five random women, God presented me to me.  Each person reflected a segment of my personality.  My past and my present were all on display.  No one else would get this lesson.  It was written expressly for me to find…a little gem among the millions of interpretations displayed by our Master to help us on our journey. John Wesley said that ‘perfection is a process’.  God wants us to pay close attention.

from Darcy  

I remember Mr. Johnson, my high school geometry teacher, who said that his course was more about learning to think than shapes and angles. He was right. I don’t remember much about dodecahedrons, but the logical thinking survived a lifetime (so far, at least). In geometry we would go through a logic process of proving that one shape was similar to another, and if so, they were said to be congruent. Similarly psychologists might say that same thing about a person if the various parts of their personality were internally consistent.

C. Michael Thompson’s “The Congruent Life: Following the Inward Path to Fulfilling Work and Inspired Leadership” begins with the discussion of ethics that I presented in the last post. If you thought about the various parts of your daily life after reading it, perhaps you’ve seen where you have pressure to have a different set of ethics at home, at work, at your organization meetings, at church. Thompson in both his work life as a high profile attorney and later as a teacher at business school found what he considered a disturbing occurrence of that divorce of ethics and work. If you are congruent, then the ethics that you derive from a relationship with God should be brought into all the other areas of your life. And you should not be ashamed of that.

I talked about three men that I have worked with who made great show about being Christian businessmen, but who then also found a way to walk away from promises or contracts they had with me. That is hardly congruent. What else does that mean? It also means that, even though I’ve long since quit worrying about that lost money, but I will always be suspect of their true relationship with God. It never shook my faith, but what if they had business dealings with someone who is thinking about a deeper relationship with God. This sort of experience could turn them away. Psychologists also talk about people perceiving a congruent person as being sincere. I would love to grow into that.

So, how do your angles measure up?

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