Hundred words...probably the start of many more

I have to write about a hundred words for my vocations officer about myself to send to my potential DDO (director of ordinands). As I write this, I have a small gut churn so I know I'm excited but outwardly I feel a little flat. It's almost as if which ever way it all turns out, it's all going to be hard.

If I do get to Bap and I'm rejected, there will undoubtedly be a kind of grieving before the will becomes overtaken by grace and faith is restored in a God who must know what he is doing, no matter how painful it is!

If I'm never recommended to go forward to selection conference in the first place, then I will continue in this strange place I'm in - 'the inbetween times in the inbetween times' as I've come to think of it and I groan with creation.

If I am successful, and I am prepared for Bap, then this could take a long time - I mean just the preparation itself and then there is the study after the Bap if you are successful and that means more preparation - practical, spiritual, academic - some of which I'm doing now under my own steam as an independent theological college student and then if one day I do get 'the o word' then that too is going to be all about learning, growing, thinking, being practical, reaching out, loving, being and accepting and challenging and changing, teaching, reaching and preaching and probably more groaning.

Sometimes I think about running away, it's always to Australia, I don't know why - perhaps the other side of the world has something to do with it. I am then always quick to laugh at myself, looking out for the whale that God will send to swallow me up so that I end up conforming myself to his will again. This calling will not go away, if I go away, it will follow me.

...so I will write my hundred words and it will be the beginning of a dialogue which goes on forever with people and God as my story becomes mixed up with the stories of all the other people on this planet, as we all practise speaking the lines of the parts that we have been given in God's play, which is all about his Son and our homecoming. What God guarantees, but the world doesn't, is that there will be applause at the end as he watches his people journey towards him, certain are we, of our acceptance into the arms of a playwright, who loves us unconditionally, no matter how badly we have spoken our lines in his play.