ministry from this morning

I can only get what I need from Christ--the Spirit, the Divine.

No manifestation of Christ--no person, no set of ideas, no story, no testimony, nothing on this earth-- no matter how perfectly it may (or may seem to) embody the Divine (or what I wish the Divine to be), can spark the transforming fire in me and bank it such that the heat burns away the sinful states of mind that disgrace, distract and bother me.    Only the Spirit who did that work in others, and not those others, can do that to and for me. 

No one can go up the mountain for me, no one can bring down that lightening in a bottle--safe and smooth, warm and comfortable--that can change me and save me.

I have to go up there, myself.  I need to feel the shaking, smell the smoke, endure the heat, and get what I need for myself (which is freely given to all who seek it), directly from the Source.  Because when I  do, and when I come back down, my skill at living my life is improved--as are the lives of the people who must deal with me day to day.

Often I think about the number of times I have made that trip, and how I sometimes have to go, again, about things I thought long since settled.

But experience has taught me that the more open I am to going, notwithstanding the fear of making the journey, notwithstanding the dread of the humbling I will endure at the top, that  the more faithful I am about going when called, the easier it will be to face what needs to be faced and to be brought out on the other side of it.

The clarity, and the certainty, also grow that all this relentless drive to perfect me, to make me mature, to put me back into good order,  Gospel Order, to fit me for some particular purpose is not for my own benefit, at all.  It is for all those people I encounter every day who--in big and in small ways--need me, need all of us, to be the best people we all can possibly be,

Sigh.  My salvation is not about me, at all.   I am not the crown of creation--I am a means to an end that is not my own, not of my own choosing, nor even of my own understanding.   I cannot know what that end is, what it is of which I am a part.  I have learned, though, to do as I am told to do and to trust that in doing that--no matter how much difficulty and fear it pulls into my life,  I am, in some way, contributing to its unfolding.

There is no way that I can prove that, which is not to say that there is no way I can know it.   In knowing it  I have come to trust in it, and to be faithful to it.  From the trusting, and the faith, comes the proof--in the outcomes.

By our fruits, it is written, we shall be known.  We shall be tested--proved.  But it is not, actually, us that is known, tested and proved.   It is that which we worship--glorify, magnify in ourselves and on this earth--that is so revealed.