What music I am listening to: The White Stripes. Again. When I find a CD I like, I listen to it over and over, for days on end, until I grow so tired of it I put the CD away and don't bring it out again for months.
Saturday. I wish I could say that today was spent in rigorous, disciplined study, but I frittered away my hours. My worship paper remains unfinished: thank God for Sunday!
Some words from my good friend H.D. Thoreau:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
My greatest hope is that I will always live deliberately, that I will never settle into a lukewarm, mediochre life. A life of medicrity is, perhaps, one of my greatest fears. I realized today that I do not dream as I once did. When I was a little girl, I had high aspirations of becoming the first female president. In college, those aspirations gave way to the dream of becoming a world-renowned opera singer. But now, I feel as if I no longer have dreams, that all I want out of my life is family and a the proverbial house with the picket fence.
Is there any place in the ministry for high ambition? I would say no, and I offer my apologies to any Joel Osteen wanna-bes out there. I think that ambition can easily become a false idol, thus replacing the gracious God we want to serve in the first place. But I wonder if I am "settling" if I would be happy as the senior pastor of some small, rural Presbyterian church. I want to reach my full potential as a human being, only at this point, I am clueless to what that potential may be.
I'm sad that I no longer dream. When did I become so immersed in reality, in the present? Where is the little girl who so desperately wanted to change the world? When I think about changing the world, it all feels so hopeless...
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I don't think that ambition is necessarily in conflict with ministry. In fact, I think ambition is a great asset to one who is pursuing ministry as a career. What one has to be careful of, however, is the reason for one's ambition. I have met pastors and other ministers who have, yes, been ambitious, but ambitious for their own plots and plans (that sounded sinister for some reason). However, there is such a thing a selfless ambition, that seeks to do good against great odds. Or maybe I'm nuts. It's hard to tell after a day of paper-writing.
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