Reasons for doing less well but having well-being

I am not writing my 5000 word ministry reflection quickly enough and time is running out. I have three days to go and another 3000 words to craft or thereabouts and it is because I keep reading and I do not always want to write and what I read is so arresting, it sends me off into spirals of thought I just can not contain within the confines of an academic and assessment orientated report - hence another reason for blogging, even if it's just a place to store the threads I can pick up and weave something beautiful with one day, when other people are not shepherding so heavily what I can and can not read for particular certificates certifying I read and write the right stuff!! (and I can write impossibly long sentences here because I just can)

So here is another one to file away from Ministry in the Subjunctive Mood by Cynthia A. Jarvis (Theology Today 2010 66: 445)

                                                                  

I have taken the distance I live from certainty to be a gift of God for the sake of the gospel I have been ordained to proclaim. The longing, the doubt, the sighs too deep for words find me climbing the steps to the pulpit with an urgency and an astonishment that is missed in others whose proclamations major in the indicative. Such proclamation sends to my study the lost who have an inkling that they are not too far gone if even their minister admits to whistling in the dark now
and again. In the give-and-take of the classroom, the honesty dared in talking
about the efficacy of prayer or the agency of God in history or the wild prom-
ise of eternal life or the sort of truth the Bible tells becomes a conversation
whose goal is not an answer but our collective sighs too deep for words made
audible. Make no mistake, I am a relentless student of the history of doctrine.
I thrill at explicating the labyrinthine theological battles that have led us to
confess God in three-personed names. The substance of the church’s faith is
the air I breathe. But the distance I live experientially from the God the church
confesses leaves me astonished, agog, incredulous, and overwhelmed that this
could be so.