Friday 16 September 2016

07/09/2016 One year into exploration of vocation

As you can tell from the date, this post is tiny bit late, but the idea behind it is to do an anniversary blog, to look back over my vocation journey. You can see a summary of my progress so far on my page Steps on My Journey (recently nicked as a concept by my antipodes-based-vocation-blogger-turned-friend whose amazing blog you can find here).

I just watched my first, minute long vlog, which I did at 2am, having decided to start logging my journey, and in hindsight, it's bloody prophetic. In it I said that I was excited and whilst "not wanting to sound dramatic", I felt like I was on the verge of quite a big change. Sitting here, two weeks into being pastoral assistant at the church on London's Trafalgar Square, too right it's been dramatic, my life has changed entirely!

My second post was my faith history, and in the video accompanying the blog post, I said how putting it down as a sequence of events brought forth a coherent story. That feeling has been firmed up considerably in the last year. I've actually been aware of the story as it unfolds rather than only when looking back, and I think that's because I've been very slowly opening myself up to God and actually looking for God in my life, which is a big step that I'm still working on. As my last post said, God has been an underlying current in my life and often I've gone along without any awareness of God supporting me, carrying me, surrounding me, and loving me, at the time. This last year, probably more like this last six months, I've started connecting with God in the everyday fabric of life, and so catch glimpses of the pattern God is weaving.

As I said in the other post, it's been a task of submission, and I'm inching my forehead closer to the floor at God's feet, and getting better at looking at my life through heaven's eyes.

Then I watched this video after my third talk with the rector, on the 30th Nov last year, and two things struck me. I said we talked about how my stage management skills and ways of being need to be used outside of the theatre as well, and I didn't know it at the time, but I think this new job is exactly what I need to make that happen. Who I am professionally is being overlaid and interwoven with who I am at church (because I'm now professionally at church!) and that's part of the larger journey of my identity reforming as more in Christ, because I am tangibly serving God everyday. I've always said I'm not wired to be a good 'secular Christian', and sure, I'm only two weeks in, it's too soon to really say, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to prove myself right on this one.

Second thing from the video was the laughable hope I had that Lucy would send me to the ADO in January. Ha ha I laugh at myself. I have audio visual evidence that setting up expectations and deciding my own timeline for the future is utterly pointless and again, I should submit to God, be taken along by the river and just try and keep paddling in the same direction.

So many things are actually happening now. Over the last year, I have had many moments of frustration, feeling like nothing was happening at all. But looking at that list of Steps, I've been rather busy. But I shouldn't be surprised - God and I have a very slow-moving relationship, because it is true that I do better at things in life if I get to work up to it in a thorough and methodical manner. God understands that better than I do when I'm being blinded by my enthusiasm and passion. If I were able to tell my past self from a year ago that by now I would still not have seen an ADO, past-me would have been angry and sad, dismayed that what felt like a real pushing drive to follow God's call is being acted upon on a timescale that doesn't match.

But that's past-me. Present-me has grown an acceptance of the situation. I've pretty much relinquished control to God, though I still get the odd twinge of anxiety when contemplating my future. And now I'm in this job, it's enough to keep my busy and distracted, whilst at the same time obviously itself being God's tool to shape me for that future. Lucy and I are also making headway, and as you'll see in a future vlog, I'm meeting others that will be part of the journey too. Things are moving, I am changing, and I'm just so pleased with where my life has brought me.


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