Retreat

A few thoughts from when I was on retreat for a few days last week.

As I take these days to stop, to retreat, to connect again with myself and with my creator, my mind starts to wander. Those thoughts that I often try to suppress come shooting to mind.

Is this really a good use of my time?
What would people with 'proper' jobs think of this time I get?

My worries as I often realise come from these perceived external expectations. Being in 'full time ministry' is a strange thing, I think it is so easy to be a person pleaser and often it's not actually not because it's demanded of us by others but because we don't trust God enough. Are we trying to earn appreciation and affection by doing stuff? Is it because these unseen retreat days are not seen by others and can't be tangibly measured that cause my worry?

As I written about before here, trust or lack of it is at the heart of times when I feel tired and drained both physically and spiritually. The pressure to succeed, to have an outwardly successful ministry seems always to be inherently linked to these physical and spiritual conditions.

As I re-read 'Contemplative Youth Ministry' I continue to love this quote:

'Once we admit our own powerlessness to turn kids into Christians, perhaps then we can realise that ministry is a series of small acts of trust. It's more about yielding to what is already present and available than about creating or building. It's more about an attitude of trust than a mind catalogued with belief statements. If we can see that we're not in control of our ministries, maybe we can hear the truth that Mother Teresa once articulated - that in our ministries we're 'not seeking to be successful but merely faithful.' The end results of our labours are in God's hands. Hopefully we can trust that our young people belong to God. That God has been seeking to love our young people since before they were born and will continue to love them long after they leave the influence of our ministries.'

I love the release that comes with this. I'm passionate about young people coming into relationship with God, fulfilling their potential and experience the power of the creator of the universe. With that seems to come a debate that I often hear articulated but have never really internalised.

Does all of what I have already spoken about result from being 'driven'. The frustration of things not happening quickly enough drives us to formulate plans that we fit God into. Does that 'driveness' come at the expense of our 'calling?' Calling is about fitting into or being open and present to what God is doing?

I wonder what the link is between professionalism and having the knowledge of how to develop my ministry because of what I have learnt and how that compares to actually listening and being faithful to God. It's also interesting how it's when I feel that pressure to listen to God as I seek to develop things that I struggle to hear most. God doesn't seem to speak in those falsed situations but instead in those quiet whispers when I don't come with my agenda.

I deeply wish to live out a life that is different from the values held up by our world. These values of 'being busy is good', that 'outcomes are more important than process or journey', that 'value for money is quantity.'

These are all of the things that I continue to wrestle with. I wish I could find answers to my older questions before these new ones appear, but I just don't seem to work like that. Apologies to anyone who's actually read all this for more less than eloquent writing and for the interchangeable use of we/I. At times I feel as thought I am writing stuff that might resonate with others and at other times it is me just rambling and getting by as best I can.

Whatever as I have tried to articulate, this process of pouring out in this form of textual diarrhea is more important for my sanity and compartmentalisation than what I have actually ended up with. Ah process rather than product.