For whatever reason this morning I have been
experiencing some anxiety about achieving whatever God has placed in the fabric
of my life to achieve during my stay on this planet.
Over the past 6-8 years my pastoral counseling career
has been at a seeming standstill. Whereas I used to meet with 20-30 clients a
week, since I have attended my current church, I have seen all of 15-20 clients
total. (Obviously, I don’t depend on counseling to pay my bills. If I did, they
wouldn’t be paid, and I’d be living under a tree in a tent).
Thankfully, during this latest season of my life I
have been privileged to mentor several young adults in the disciplines of life
and faith and witness. And this has been exceptionally rewarding for me; more
so, (if this is possible) than my formal pastoral counseling ministry.
Now my mentoring outreach has waned, and I’m left with
that nagging anxiety that I ought to be making a difference in lives, and in
spite of the import of my previous blog, I’m not, and I sorely regret it.
Perhaps you can relate to my dilemma. I think every
conscientious person alive on earth today, Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Atheist,
for that matter, can relate to that unsettling anxiety which is part and parcel
of the realization that he or she is failing to accomplish whatever it is that
brightens their eyes and strengthens their hearts.
Dr. G. Raymond Edman wrote about the pauses which
inflict and conflict otherwise profitable seasons in our lives. And his
persuasion seemed to be that such seasons are not unlike punctuation marks in
the text of a page. Those commas, parentheses, and periods are interspersed
throughout the flow of the written word for a purpose. Each punctuation mark
provokes some connotation to the reader, and without them we would be hard
pressed to decipher the complete meaning of a given passage.
While God has applied a period to the figurative sentence
I just recently completed, I have little doubt that He will give me the wisdom
and wherewithal to write the next one, and write it well.
By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 5
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