Tag Archive: Vocation

Wait and Listen

May 14, 2020 0 Comments

What is your smaller world of interaction teaching you?

Some of you may have discovered a neglected discipline as your world has become smaller during the pandemic. Maybe you have cooked more, baked more, practiced an instrument more, gardened more, or perhaps you have rested. But my guess is that the discipline of waiting and listening for Jesus’ voice has not become “easier.” I pray that we would all be given grace to increase our capacity to listen to Jesus. If we don’t, we will miss out on so much joy.

John the Baptist’s life is full of so many discipleship lessons for the followers of Jesus. When his disciples are all stirred up by comparison and jealousy John responds with contentment, jubilation and joy.

His contentment had been nurtured through surrender and faithfulness.

He says, “A person can only receive what is given them from heaven.” Without this surrender and perseverance in relationship to God John would not have had joy.

John’s joy has been nurtured through clarity and conviction.

He is clear about who He is and what is about. His identity flows from His relationship with God and the unique time in which He has been situated in God’s plan. John richly describes his relationship with Jesus, with himself, and his relationships with people and the stuff of earth through the metaphor of the wedding party. John says,

“The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.” (John 3:29-30)

The Friend of the Groom

When you are part of the wedding part, the groom’s men or the bride’s maids you have certain responsibilities and roles to play. At the wedding the point of focus is not you; it’s the groom and bride. As the friend of the groom you are not trying to upstage him; you want to attend to his needs and to his purposes in loving, celebrating, and building up his bride.

John says he has been attending to Jesus, the Messiah. John has been waiting for Jesus. John has been listening for Jesus. And when Jesus speaks, John has joy. When the bride moves toward Jesus John celebrates and feels a sense of completion in his life.

Are you learning to wait on and listen for Jesus? Our joy is in hearing his voice and responding to Him in obedience.

Waiting and listening are not passive; they require attentive effort.

At at wedding celebration the friend of the groom may be seen sitting, walking, and standing. Sometimes he appears to be alone — but he may actually be on task for the groom. Sometimes he appears to be with the groom: sitting, walking, standing. Sometimes the friend of the groom may be attending to a need of the groom’s bride on the groom’s behalf. There is joy in all of it.

But all the activity has as its point of reference that the friend of the groom has been able to wait and to listen.

Even while active in mundane or once-in-a-lifetime tasks, the friend of the groom is mindful to listen for the groom’s voice.

This is John’s internal posture: attending to the voice of Jesus.

Is it yours?

You can nurture this kind of attention through:

daily surrender to Jesus.

daily openness to His Spirit filling you.

daily feeding on His Words and the stories of Jesus’ life.

daily mindfulness to His nudge drawing your attention to people so you can participate in what He is doing in their lives and yours.

celebrating the union of the Church with Jesus the Lamb of God!

Discipleship, Jesus, Leadership, Work

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Doing Anything Worth Doing for the Long Haul

June 26, 2019 0 Comments

I finished reading Michael Foley’s new book, Farming for the Long Haul today. Besides the delight and joy of putting my hands in the soil and serving up the fruit of this labour, I also take the Apostle Paul’s command to Timothy to heart: consider the hard-working farmer. In my own vocation attentiveness to the hard-working farmer has generated some wisdom. Hopefully its wisdom that will keep me in my vocation for the long haul too!

Michael currently farms in California at Green Uprising Farm with his wife and eldest daughter. Besides serving on several farming related boards, he is the cofounder of the School of Adaptive Agriculture and manages his local farmers market.

I offer this lengthy quote from Michael Foley in which wisdom for the long haul nurtures a kind of stewardship that resists the impulse to just move on or to just take what you can from a place:

Exodus resonates in our culture, even today, because much of the settlement of the United States was experienced as an exodus from tyranny, precarious living conditions, or overcrowding. Oscar Handlin’s classic study of European immigrants to the United States draws in broad strokes the situation of peasants in an overcrowded Europe; and the portrait applies to the circumstances of many immigrants. The impulse to simply move on in the face of limited opportunities at home fueled the westward migration of both these and earlier settlers and informed our own culture of mobility.

Exodus may be an alternative to captivity, but it is also an exile. And exiles settle uneasily on the land and often find their former experiences less than helpful with new soil, a new climate, new conditions of production, and new markets. They leave behind their long experience of stewardship, if they enjoyed it at all, and they are too apt to move on again rather than cultivate the soil and the society where they find themselves. They can lend diversity and richness to they places they come to, but it takes years, even generations, to grow the sorts of roots that are required to tend the land well.

As Wendell Berry says, genuine stewardship lies “in the possibility of settled families and local communities, in which the knowledge of proper means and methods, proper moderations and restraints, can be handed down, and so accumulate in place and stay alive; the experience of one generation is not adequate to inform and control its actions.” (“The Making of a Marginal Farm” reprinted in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, 2017. p. 45) Thanks to the relentless uprooting that a national economy and education system focused on upward mobility has thrust upon us, and to our own immigrant roots, most Americans are exiles, and those of us who choose to recover the sounder principles of caring for land and community are only slowly learning to be rooted. We should avoid exodus where we can. We will need a culture that rewards and encourages rootedness instead of mobility if we are to assume a role as proper stewards of the land and truly farm for the long haul. But that means that we will need also to cultivate voice as our first and most persistent response to the larger forces that attempt to shape our destiny.

Michael Foley. Farming for the Long Haul, Resilience and the Lost Art of Agricultural Inventiveness. 2019. p. 194-195.

Farming for the Long Haul from Amazon

Career, Relationships, Work

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