What have you been thinking about recently?

Have you ever been asked this question? Or perhaps put on the spot to share what you've been learning spiritually? I'm an extrovert who usually has a quick answer to almost any question (Sunday school teachers loved me because they'd never be faced with a totally silent crowd), but these questions often make me squirm. Anyhow, today I've challenged myself to put something down on the screen which gives a part-way answer. As usually, I'm thinking about a lot of vastly different stuff. But here is a selection.

Thinking about supporting others
In the context of talking about roles that we do on the mission field, a fellow missionary said to me the other day, "You know, everyone wants to be supported, but no one wants to do the supporting." I'd never thought about it like that before. He also said, "Being willing to be in a supporting role and also being able to do it are not that common a combination."

As someone who is primarily in a support role, this is important. It is easy to promote the fact that being a missionary in a supporting role is important, but sometimes I have trouble believing my own words. It is easy to slip into the thinking pattern that tells me I am just doing a second-rate job. That because God hasn't gifted me as an evangelist or a linguist, I am taking the crumbs, the left-over jobs. But it isn't true. God knew what He was doing when He made me, He didn't make a mistake. He knew that these gifted evangelists and church planters would need support, would need people to help them, to encourage them. He knew that people would be needed to put together the magazine, to write the blog, to help run a retreat, to answer queries from the website. He knew that educators, communicators, administrators, medicos, leaders, visionaries, counsellors and financially savvy people would be needed.

On a journey

In the plethora of thoughts, challenges and input I've been receiving recently there has been a pilgrimage theme running through. The idea that God isn't finished with me yet. That He has promised more, if I'll just stick with Him.

I read John 15:2  again today: "He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." I've had a real sense of being pruned in recent months. That should be an encouragement to me - it is not random, it is so that I'll be more fruitful.

I've had an acute awareness that that journey isn't without pain. I remember a time when I was young and worried that I hadn't had much suffering in my life - and therefore how was I to grow spiritually! I shouldn't have worried. 

I've also become aware that as I move on in my spiritual journey, I leave people behind. People who remain in my life, yet who are stuck in different places or just at a different place or moving at a different pace to me in their spiritual journey. They don't understand why I seem to be moving away and that hurts. It also challenges my feeling that I should be a perfect ______ (put a relationship here). But the reality is that perfection on this earth is beyond my grasp, even if I did (miraculously) obtain something close to perfection, I'd still be surrounded by less-than-perfect people. We can never have perfect, 100% satisfying relationships this side of heaven.

So here is a verse God has placed on my heart for the next part of the journey:

"Teach me how to live to please you,

because you're my God.

Lead me by your blessed Spirit

into cleared and level pastureland." (Psalm 143:10 The Message)

Well that is all a bit random, but perhaps gives you an insight into what I've been thinking about recently.