Discernment

Discernment is the fancy word that church people often use for trying to figure out what God wants. And knowing what God wants is a pretty hard thing. The Bible isn’t always clear about the big truths, and it certainly can be very unclear about specifics. The Church is supposed to help, your brothers and sisters in Christ joining you in prayer and offering wisdom, but that is unclear as well. And The Church has been wrong in the past. Sometimes a prophet stand alone.

At the end of the day, what are we left with? Faith. Grace. Humility. Faith to trust God. Grace to know that even bad choices can be used by God. Humility in accepting that we are frail and faulty.

Karla is a new High Calling blogger. She is currently in the discernment process for becoming a deacon in the Episcopal Church. And she is uncertain of what she should do. Her post is so honest and tender and open. I thought you might like to listen in as one of God’s servants seeks to know God’s will for her life.

I have ambivalent feelings these days about continuing to move ahead with diaconal discernment. There are many times where I believe that I had the wrong idea about the nature of the ordained diaconal order in the Episcopal church, or at least how it’s expressed in my locality, and resultantly, how it matches my gifts and God’s call to me. And there’s no reason to beat myself up about having started this pathway and now stepping off it; just accept it and move on, but alas, that inability to stop beating myself up for being wrong, or misreading signs and circumstances leads to the dark underbelly of an otherwise admirable trait in me of fidelity and commitment: a prideful reluctance to quit, even when it seems like the right thing to do. Among the things God is showing me I need work on through all of this...Read More