It’s been too long since I posted!

Anyway, today (in my supplemental office readings) I read a poem (couldn’t figure out the author, but it’s from Celtic Daily Prayer) part of which goes like this:

Help me to find my happiness
in my acceptance
of what is Your purpose for me …
in the awareness
of Your presence in my spirit.

Then I came across this (from the Tao Te Ching as quoted in Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict):

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are,
When you realize there is nothing lacking
the whole world belongs to you.

I’m still wrestling with retirement.

I’m doing a lot of supply work (and getting more feedback, very positive feedback, on my preaching than I’m used to receiving).  I got some very positive feedback on a workshop I gave Saturday on prayer.  I’m working with our diocesan Fresh Start program and with our Budget Committee.  I was free to go to Wichita to help my daughter for 10 days (and to visit my in-laws for 3 days earlier in the summer).  I’m doing some (non blog) writing and playing in a band.  I’m still part of a lectionary study group.  It looks like Anne and I will be taking up kayaking.  (I’ve done less birding over the summer than I intended.)  And I probably want to be working less than full-time, at least over the long-term, so that I have time to do all of the above.

At the same time, I’d like to be working more than I am working.  I’m trying to find my way.  Or, more properly, I’m trying to hear what God has in mind for me.  And it isn’t all that clear — at least to me.  So finding my happiness in my acceptance of God’s purpose for me speaks to me.  Being content with what I have, which is more than adequate, and rejoicing in the way things are, which is pretty good, speaks to me.  Especially as I wait for God’s purpose to become clearer.  I’m still thinking I’m in transition to something.  It’s possible I’m in transition to what is.

Time will tell.  If I can listen with a quiet mind and an open heart.  If I can be honest about what I hear.  And that’s not all that easy to do.  I find I have my own notions of what should be happening.  And, so far, they don’t seem to have fully coincided with God’s notion of what should be happening.