Buechner: Spiritual Gifts
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”—Frederick Buechner.
Our Sunday lectionary today is about call, the call of the disciples, the call of Jonah.
In today’s world, Frederick Buechner gives us the best advice about how to find our ministry in perhaps his most quoted phrase about the meeting of “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.”
The Spirit gives us gifts for our ministry for doing God’s work. As with “the varieties of our gifts” mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, there are a great variety of spiritual gifts that we are not aware of. The Rev. Dr. Kate Alexander reminds us recently that we must not just limit what we think our spiritual gifts may be to those described in biblical times and not just think that every spiritual gift must at first seem “spiritual.” She gives the example of proofing the Sunday bulletin to further the work of God as being an important ministry performed by people with a very detailed, unique ministry.
We are to remember that the gifts are to further the work of God, not necessarily our work or our agenda or our goals.
Besides giving us several inventories, material from the Stephen Ministry, by Stephen Haugk, leads us through other clues to our spiritual gifts. The gifts we see in our most admired person may be ours. The gift we use to bring about our most fulfilling life events may be our gift. The action of Jesus we most admire may be our gift.
I also learned from Lloyd Edwards in his book, Discerning Your Spiritual Gifts, that significant gifts may come out of our woundedness. For example, those in recovery stay in recovery by helping others recover from addiction. Those who have experienced the death of a significant person are often the ones who can later best help heal others who are grieving.
Parker Palmer’s, Let Your Life Speak, is another classic book about where and how God leads us into the servant ministry God has created us to take part in.
My experience is, I think I am using my gift when I am energized by the ministry in which I am involved. I put energy in and more comes out. The tried and true biblical fruit of the Spirit can also be an indicator of when we are using our spiritual gifts. Galatians 5 tells us we will feel and know “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” when we are connected to, guided by the Spirit.
God is seeking each of us out and calls us. God wants all of us—because there are so many things to do today and tomorrow, right in the midst of our life in this pandemic and our very troubled world and country, things that only each one of us uniquely can do, where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”
Joanna joannaseibert.com