Saturday, July 30, 2016

A prophet: Who? Me?

It has been some time since I have posted anything on my blog, I realise, but now that I am nearly a year in to ministry I thought I should offer something of a reflection on that year. There is much I could say, much I could tell, and much I really cannot put down into words. There have been highs, points of great celebration, along with some lows and even moments of dispair. However, as my reflect on the year, I want to share with you a reflection I wrote in recent weeks for a weekly time of worship one of my churches has in the middle of the week. It is a reflection that is based on the opening of the book of Jeremiah - Jeremiah 1.4-10. It reflects some of what commentators say about this passage and the prophet Jeremiah, but also reflects very much on where my journey so far has taken me... 

I did try to make an excuse, to find a reason why not; I even tried to explain that I was far from ready. What I had been asked to do, what I was expected to do, was no small thing and at that point I did not know what sort of burden, what sort of unbearable strain the task would put me under.

The words “a prophet to the nations” seem so simple to say, even have a grandeur about them that maybe the speaker thought that that would make them hard to resist. But what did I have to say that was worth listening to? Even among family and friends my voice had often gone unheard, so how was I ever going to make myself heard among the nations? But of course the answer can never be ‘no’. There was a counter argument to all that I argued that I could not dispute. And even my reason for ‘no’ which was critical to what I had been asked to do had been swept away with a touch of a hand and the words: “I have put my words in your mouth.”

Since then I have watched my life, as was, stripped away. I’ve gone to places and depths I never thought I would ever reach. I have experienced things that would have broken me beyond repair if I had relied on my own resources.

God called me to be “a prophet to the nations”, but that did not just mean me speaking up and speaking out. It meant me listening. Listening to God’s voice, God’s words, with a level of attentiveness far greater than you might expect. It meant me examining God’s words with respect to my own very being before proclaiming their sometimes harshness but reality to others. God’s words were, are, not just for the nations—they were and are for me too.

And it is this truth that gives me the authority to speak and to declare and know that I do not speak in my own strength. I do not go from place to place under my own steam, for all I do, I do through and in the strength of the one who called me; who has known me from before I was born.