At our first small-group discussion on the retreat, the question was, "name three things about you that create your identity." It's one of those questions where you can either go deep or keep it really surface and talk about your cat, so I suppose it was a good first question.
I have to admit, I always look for the "right" answer to things like this. I suppose by default it's usually Jesus, like in the joke where the Sunday School teacher asks who invented the light bulb and one of the kids sighs, "I guess the answer must be Jesus again."
What I eventually came up with was something about ministry, that I get a lot of my identity from the ministry that I do. Which is pretty true; I mean, my job is ministry. What I do with a lot of my free time is ministry. I managed to expand on that enough that no one mentioned that I skipped the second and third things. Ha.
I've been thinking about the ministries I'm involved in a lot lately, especially the weekly small group that I'm now leading. I've only been leading it for a month or so, after being in it for a year. Leading has been a good stretching kind of thing for me, since I've never done this before. It's a weird thing being in a leadership position, though. I have to admit that my mind is more on doing all the nice facilitator things and watching the clock to be sure we have enough time for each segment than it is on really being present to the group. Maybe that will dissipate as I get more comfortable doing it. I am thinking about joining another small group that meets on another day because I really miss the feeling of being a participant.
I'm also suspecting that after over a year of meeting every week, my current group has perhaps pushed me as far as they're going to spiritually. There's a lethargy that has set in. We're comfortable together, we have fun, I genuinely like these people...but that's not really the point. We're too comfortable, and I'm in a mood to make myself a little less comfortable these days. Maybe the problem is just that comfort is way different from covenant. It's like a squishy soft blanky that doesn't ask anything of you.
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