You can’t play chicken with God. Say you have a specific task that you were put on this earth to do, and you are one of the rare ones who knows what it is. To delay doing it to buy more time won’t work. God will just take it from you and give it to someone else to do. I’ve lost track of the number of times this happens in the Bible.

Even questioning God can get you in trouble, if you do it too much. Moses questioned God four times, when God called him to go to Pharaoh to get the Israelites freed from slavery. He didn’t think he was able to do it. He kept coming up with excuses and God kept coming up with workarounds for him. At the end, God sent an angel to kill him, and it was only the intervention of Moses’ wife that saved him. Kind of a crazy story. The Bible is full of them.

My theory? If God calls you to do something, it means that you have the ability to do it. God knows you better than you know yourself. God made you. The problem? Knowing that it is an actual call from God.

You are a tool. The pot cannot tell the potter how to use it. The car does not matter to the driver. If the car breaks down, the driver will just get another car. So questioning God and coming up with reasons you can’t do it won’t help you at all.

But what if you don’t know what your calling is? What if you have no idea why God put you on this Earth? Then it is good to not fight it either. Be OK with being a block in the building. Be OK with being a puzzle piece, and not seeing the big picture.

My problem, well, one of many, is that there are a lot of things that I would like to write about that I think are of significance. There are things I’ve come to understand through my prayer life that I feel would be helpful. There are insights I get from reading scripture that I think are new takes on old words. But I don’t feel that my writing is good enough, or that I have the time to dedicate to it to do it justice. I find that I only have time to write for about thirty minutes at a time, and for some reason I feel I have to create a completed post in that time.

Yes, I realize these are all excuses. I don’t have to post something every day. I’m not being paid for this. Nobody would notice if I didn’t post for a few days, so I could work on something bigger. But I know me – if I get out of the habit of posting, then I’ll take more time off, and then I won’t post at all. There is something about making a routine of it that is forcing me to write, and writing is helping me figure things out.

I’m reminded of the last meeting I had with my former priest. She said that my spiritual insights were immature. She said that she often had to bite her tongue to not say “I figured that out years ago!” The fact that she told me that erased all the tongue-biting she had done.

This is harmful, and hurtful, and not Christ-like.

This is part of why I had to leave.

Maybe my insights are simple. Maybe they are things she figured out years ago. But making fun of someone else’s spiritual journey isn’t the mark of a religious leader.

Perhaps I shared those insights with her because deep down I didn’t think she knew them. I’m not sure which ones she was talking about. Obviously at one point she thought I was onto something because she was the one who proposed that I enter the deacon discernment program.

Ugh. I’m still bitter about that whole thing. I’m trying to process this. I don’t want to be stuck here angry with it, but turning away from it is not a good idea.

There is a sense of abandonment, of being hung out to dry. There is also a sense of freedom in leaving. I feel that in a way she did me a favor by being so over-the-top in our last meeting. It provided a clean break with no turning back. I knew when I first started going back to church that the Episcopal Church was as close as I could get at the time. I’d prayed about it, and that was the reply. So I knew going into it that there was going to be an end to it. I knew I was going to leave.

I was hoping for more of a dove-tail leaving than a severing, but it wasn’t up to me.

And that too is part of the process. It is about trusting God, however I’m led. It is about following, and trying not to get in the way. It is about trying to be a worthy vessel.

I feel alone in the wilderness, yet right at home.