ECHO FROM GOD

I found the following quote this week and though I've already posted it to my Facebook page to share, it continues to haunt me (in a good way).

"In this world, the emerging church needs cybermonks to act as spiritual guides. They blog their stories with image, narrative, and experience. They design websites to provide spiritual resources online. This is not a modern 'come to us because we have a great worship service...' it's a postmodern 'here are our spiritual resources, feel free to try-before-you-buy.' The cybermonk is a new missionary calling.”

So much of what I've done as THE CELTIC MONK, PEACE RIVER SPIRITUALITY CENTER, and now PRESBYDICTINES and BENEDICTERIANS is just that; a calling to live out the much I've been given outside the confines of brick and mortar--most noticably absent, a steeple.

In my blogs I open my spiritual experience warts and all for others to ponder or to use as a mirror. PRSC has been home to a weekly meditation group and compline prayer since August of 2009 in addition to several book groups and the welcome space for spiritual direction visits, and individual retreats. P & D (on Facebook) is where I am currently sharing daily snippets from the Rule of Benedict, which in itself is one of my daily disciplines. Then there are growing areas, like the Twelve Week Introduction to Meditation which folks have signed up for--where installments of teaching and encouragement are delivered to your inbox periodically to help establish (or re-establish) a habit of meditation.

These are all things that in one way or other I did while on a church staff; telling my story in narrative and images in sermons, beginning or participating in a prayer ministry and pastoral care, telling folks about my spritual practices and offering to teach them how to begin. It's just that now I do these things most often via the internet, www, and skype(or in the living room of PRSC).

The haunting part in putting all this together is recognizing my Call in these many things. The very things that make up the ministry that I'm trying to launch are the things that called me into ministry over 20 years ago. The very things that I offer now through presence and cyberspace, are those things that I offered in some form to each of the congregations I pastored.

This week as I read and re-read the quote above it kept coming back to me as something familiar. I realize now that it came back to me as an echo of God. All that I'm doing is not so new... it's who I was created to be--and what God created me to do. This New Missionary Calling as The Celtic Cyber-Monk...is merely the same calling in a new vehicle.

What are the recurring themes in your life? What are you invited to do today, that you did 10, 20 or 30 or more years ago? Do you believe those invitations or circumstances to be coincidences? If you pause with them for a moment, perhaps you'll learn as I did, that they are really the echo of God's call on your life from long, long ago.

I'm encouraged by the grace of this new insight. I hope as you spend some time in the weeks ahead listening for the echo of God's call on your life, that you'll be encouraged too; encouraged to continue where God has and is still calling you. BLESSINGS AND JOY, THE CELTIC MONK

P.S. I included the photo of the whale, since she reminds me that creatures can travel great distances navigating storms and negotiating relationships with the echo as their only communication tool. :)