Fettered and Chained Up in Clay

I was at a retreat at Quaker Center a couple of weeks ago on "Nurturing Vocal Ministry." It was sort of a strange place to find myself, as vocal ministry hasn't been a priority for me. I went because a friend asked me to go, and was surprised to find the workshop to be personally useful.
Over the course of the weekend, I found myself coming back yet again to a message in meeting for worship from a few months ago. A person spoke about a conversation she'd had with her daughter. The children had been discussing ministry in first day school. The children were learning that unprogrammed Quakers don't have designated ministers, because we are all ministers, and speak in meeting when prompted by the spirit. This friend's daughter said that it was more than just speaking in meeting, that "a person's whole life is their ministry."

That ministry has become one of those touchstone messages, one that I return to again and again to keep myself on track. One of the recurrent themes that message touched on was the idea of stewardship. I've been thinking, in my typical scattered and circular manner, about stewardship of many kinds of resources: environmental, financial, and personal resources of time, health, talent, and energy. I've been especially pondering the spiritual underpinnings of the choices I make with regards to those resources. And I've been finding it nearly impossible to write about any of it, or speak about much of it.

One reason for my inarticulateness is that whatever changes I've made in my life are so small and not really established as routine. I worry about seeming self-righteous, hypocritical, and/or just plain silly if I talk or especially write about any of it. To deem any of what is working in me now as ministry seems the height of hubris. And yet I don't know what I think, where I'm being led, if I can't put it into words somehow.

So where is Spirit leading me right now? To the best of my ability to discern, it seems that I am being led to question assumption after assumption about how I live my life. I'm going to attempt to address this in an on-going series of posts.