A Rough Weekend In Gods Loving Arms...

I had a tough session with my teaching parish supervisor this past Friday. Self Confidence is perpetually a growing edge of mine and she seemed really frusterated that I dont have a ton of it. However I felt like I have greatly improved in the context of teaching parish. When people go on and on about things that can trigger emotions easily, I tend to make an effort not to say a whole lot really because I do not want to say anything that I will regret. However she said things that made me feel like I should not have come back to PLTS at all when I started having difficulty with my contextual education office at school a year and a half ago. I wondered why the hell I have kept continuing. I will acknowledge that some settings seem to make me more naturally outgoing than others and for some reason I have had to push myself more at teaching parish, which I think really is the big question that I am wrestling with right now. Alot of things she said made me question my competency for pastoral ministry and if I need to consider something else.

I wonder if it was at all related to the fact that I had a very awkward encounter with someone in the parish who was asking me something that I felt was unreasonable and I got extremely nervous, not wanting to say yes for the sake of my own boundaries and not wanting to say no because of how uneasy that they felt. They might have talked to her which about this and this seemed to fuel all kinds of things she didnt like about me. My sermon last Sunday was on the list of things.

This conversation left me feeling like I have wasted a lot of my time, feeling sad, hurt and devastated. I channeled this energy into making this yummy chicken which is a South Beach alternative to Buffalo Wings. I let someone hanging out in the dorm kitchen try the chicken and he said that I did an awesome job on it. At that moment, I felt like I was living in an alternate universe as my comptence for pastoral ministry had been questioned and my cooking commended.

I wound up driving to a friends karoake birthday party in El Cerrito. It was a blast! I had a lot of fun singing and dancing during the night. The birthday boy requested to sing love shack with me, so I did. I also sang "Hopelessly Devoted to you" from Grease. This party was seriously the most fun that I have had in a LONG time. Sometimes I get in moods where I dont feel like partying but prefer the notion of relaxing. However Friday was a time where I needed to do something fun to distract myself from the conversation I had with my teaching parish supervisor during the day.

But as I was leaving around midnight I noticed that my contacts were really foggy. It probably was from crying much of the day. I enjoy having a drink or two at parties but I dont drink at all when I have been in a bad mood recently and so I stayed away. Despite my sobriety, my contacts made me ask a sober friend to drive my car.

The brake lights in my car had randomly come on in the past week. I was thinking I needed to get that checked out. And that night my friend driving the car noticed that my brakes were barely working. The next day she urged me to get it checked out. I knew that she was concerned but it kind of made me start balling because its been a very financially difficult semester already with lousy health insurance and my various loan check dramas. But I felt like I should go in to somewhere to get the breaks looked at. I brought it into the first place who ssaid that they would look at it on Saturday.

So I brought it into Big O Tires. They inspected it and told me that they couldnt let me take the car at all because all kinds of things were wrong with the breaks making it unsafe to drive. They gave me a listing of all the things that I needed to be charged for. When I saw that the amount was around 1500 I found myself very unhappy. And yet I have already lost a good portion of my life to the ramifications of a car accident, and preventing an accident that could easily kill another person and kill or severely injure me didnt seem to have a price tag on it either.

However the reality of the car made me feel even more depressed than I already felt because of the conversation with my teaching parish pastor. Then what happened with the rest of my day was just rather odd.

You see the thing is that I am a very introverted person. Sometimes I just crave alone time. However I was sad enough that I didnt feel like being alone on Friday and Saturday. I called my mentor on Friday evening and I went to the party. On Saturday, I had a dorm mate more than willing to help me out with whatever I needed. Then I got a variety of phone calls from people that I havent heard from in awhile, one of whom I hadnt heard from in years. I spent much of my weekend on the phone.

Its kind of funny really because alot of times I feel like I dont hear from people that I am not related to that often. And then I will have a stretch of 48 hours as the time where I actually get a hold of people or they actually call me. Its kind of bizzarre really. But this weekend was one of those times.

I tend to be cautious about how I say God works in my life. I am cautious because people who use that kind of language on a regular basis sometimes lack intellegent grounding for their faith. That kind of language is used as a sense of manipulation. And also I think that there are other forces at work in the world that are not from God that can be misinterpreted as God. Yet despite all of these hesitations, I know that hearing from all of these people in the course of this weekend was a work of the Holy Spirit. It was one of those prayers that I didnt know to articulate myself that God answered really. I didnt deal with the weekend alone by any means. I was assured of Gods presence through friends and family.

So when I went to bed on Saturday evening, despite all my sorrows and weariness that I had felt in the course of the day, I went to bed assured of God's love and grace when I realized what had happened. This doesnt mean these other details of my life dont need to be resolved, rather it gives me strength to face them. Friday night I kept waking up in the night crying. But Saturday night I went to bed assured of God's love and grace (and also emotionally exhausted) even if I am questioning the direction of my own life.