What To Do With It?

Ministerial Meandering

What to do with it?

Let us assume that you are in senior school at around the age of 16 or 17, and you are having an interview with the school’s Career Advisor.

Maybe no such thing exists or existed in your schooling - nor did it in mine.  Our career advisors were our parents, if they showed any interest at all.

However, let us also assume that your Career Advisor is brighter than the average bear, and not only does he or she help you to find out what you are good at - what your innate gifts are - but also asks you what you think you should do with them.

Now that may not be as dumb a question as you think it probably is.  Your initial response might be that finding yourself to be skilled in rhetoric and logic, you should go into the legal profession; finding yourself adept at technical problems you might consider a trade, such as carpentry, welding, ironwork, jewelry making; finding yourself swept away by the sound of an orchestra, you might reasonably gravitate to a musical career.

But that is only the first part of the question.  

Perceive yourself now as Elijah, who has run from Jezebel to save his life, as she has slaughtered all the other prophets, and now you’re hiding in a cave in the mountains.  You have smashed your prophetic staff in a fit of peak and self-pity, and just want the roof of the cave to fall in and bury you. Then God comes along and asks you, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  Like your Career Advisor asking, “What are you good at?”

So you tell him; “I was a really good banjo player, and I played my heart out all my life till now -  and now that bitch Jezebel has broken it, and found a better player.

Then God asks again, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  Your Career Advisor says to you, “Yes, I know you’re a fine banjo player - but what are you going to do with it?”

You are about to whine out the same lame excuse, when the penny drops that you don’t really understand the question you are being asked.

This is where Career Advisors and parents fall down so often, because they don’t appreciate that we are - all of us - spiritual beings - dabbling in a temporary pool of humanity.  Our home is not this world; we are journeying through it - but with gifts that enable us to survive.  That is, we have enough skills to make a living and so ‘live till we die.’  But that is not enough.

The words of the poignant and plaintive song come to mind that Peggy Lee sang with deadpan face in 1969, ‘Is that all there is?’

To which the answer is a very definite ‘No’ - unless you think that you live for yourself alone - with maybe a thought for your family on occasion.  You sad people live on a flat plane, a two-dimensional world.  You have no hope - except in your own prowess and pride; you are orphans of the universe - about which you know so much.  And so little.

You build towers of straw and houses of cards with your brilliance and intellect - and yet, at the end of your time you will be singing along with Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?”

And you will have missed the point all your life; you are not your own - you are a work of art, a creation, a small masterpiece - but you spent all your life in the toilet, singing to the bowl and painting on the wall, whingeing that the toilet isn’t bigger - because you know, somewhere inside, that you’re worth more than this.

And you are.  You were bought with a price.  God - and the really ‘Good’ Career Advisor - want to give you a new banjo and ask again, “What are you doing here?  What are you going to do with your gift?”

And this time you are going to say, “I’m going to play it the best I can, for You and your people all over the world - till the day you call me home.”

Philip+