Keeping my Vows of Ministry

“I need your help in keeping my beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. I don’t trust myself; my emotions seduce me into infidelities. I know I am launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith in life, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. I need your help. Let God speak through you into all the different parts and stages of my life – in my work and play, with my children and my parents, at birth and death, in my celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over me in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle.

This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, there are other things to be done but this task is vitally important for my soul. One more thing: This is not a temporary job assignment for you but a way of life that I need lived out day after day. I know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as I am. I know your emotions are as fickle as mine and your mind is a tricky as mine. That is why I am asking you to commit to this. I know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when I won’t feel like believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And I know there will be days and weeks and even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are called to this role in my life.

Promise right now that you won’t give in to my reluctance and resistance. You are not the servant of my changing desires or my time-conditioned understanding of my needs, or my secularized hopes for something better.

There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and I am responsible for doing at least some of them, but if I am not reminded of the foundational realities with which we are dealing – God, kingdom, gospel – I am going to end up living a futile, fantasy life. Your task, in my life, is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, and speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.” Will you fight for my soul?

(Paraphrased from Peterson The Contemplative Pastor )