Yesterday, most of our community headed to the Pretoria Botanical Gardens for a reflection day. I spent the morning sitting in the sun on the patio of the restaurant, enjoying a cappuccino, reading poetry, and journaling while looking out at the gardens. The past few weeks have been full of moments where I’ve felt God speaking to me, but I haven’t been able to hang on to his words. I wanted to take time yesterday to sit with some of the things I’ve felt God saying, things that seem like they’ve been slipping away too easily.
Yesterday seemed like a Gerard Manley Hopkins day. His poetry is filled with glimpses of God in and through nature. And as I sat outside at the botanical gardens, reading Hopkins, God met me both in poetry and in his creation around me.
The past few months here have been ones of great transition for me. I’ve been figuring out a role that’s quite different from last year—staff instead of apprentice—and the process has been bringing up struggles of identity. Where do I fit in this community, am I valued in my new role, what does ministry look like now—ultimately: where do I fit and what am I supposed to be doing? I’ve come to see more and more over the past couple of weeks that the question at the root of it all is: who am I in Christ?
During a time of prayer on Friday night, Sarah prayed for me and said she sensed God saying that he was proud of me. I struggled with that, wondering what it was that God could possibly be proud of: lately, my time with God has been erratic at best, I’m struggling to find my footing in relationships both inside and outside of the community, I’m still trying to get started again in ministry, and more often than not I feel I have little to offer (or that I’m offering little).
The message of “I’m proud of you” was one of the things I wanted to pray about and reflect on yesterday. But before I even got to that, I read the following poem:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
I was struck by these lines:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
In these lines, I saw the deepest call given to all creation: simply to be who we are; who God has created each one of us to be. It is from that identity that our actions flow. We’ve been reading Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy for the past six weeks, and one of the big things I’ve gleaned from this book is that the way to “kingdom living” comes from inner transformation: not trying harder to do the right thing, but becoming the type of person who naturally does the right thing. It may seem like a small distinction, but it’s been revolutionary for me. Changes in action come from a change in identity. When I recognize who I am in Christ, it changes everything else. I may not yet be fully living out that identity, but that’s who I am.
God sees me as I am—he sees me as who he created me to be. I have not yet reached that in my everyday. Some days I’m much closer to being who I’m created to be, and some days I veer far from it. But in God’s eyes, that is who I am. And that’s who he’s proud of. Not what I am or am not doing, not what I’m doing well or poorly, but just me. Above all else, he has created me to be who I am: “What I do is me; for that I came.”
In a book of essays I was reading in February, I came across this quote: “First, be. Second, love. Finally, worship.” The author went on to say: “We may find it’s possible that if we do just one of those things completely we may have done all three.” Right now, God is teaching me to be. And when I am able to most fully be—to be who I am in God’s eyes—it can’t help but draw me to love and to worship.
