I always feel that, when I preach, I convict and challenge and confront and encourage myself as much as, if not more than, anyone else. The preaching arises from the word of God speaking into my life and into the life we share in community together. In preaching this week, I quoted Oscar Romero:
"We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work... Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us...We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that... This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.”
This week, I want, desperately, to grow into that reality - of being liberated by the enormity of the task rather than burned out by it.
Perhaps if I spent some time sitting with the notion instead of trying to disprove it, perhaps if I accepted better my inability to achieve everything, perhaps if I made some room for God's grace instead of birling like a demented dervish so that the centrifugal force of my frenetic activity sweeps the space around me of everything that might assist the Kingdom of God, perhaps then, I might know liberation.
I certainly intend to continue to allow these words of wisdom to meander with me until I reach the point where it is me who meanders with them. Such a turnaround might just bring some true liberation and make room for God's grace to get to work - in my life and in the lives of those to whom I minister.
Love the quote and love your wrestling with it - I too am looking forward to that kind of liberation - I think I see it on the horizon :-) Hugs
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