Don’t Let It Get You Down
As we’ve been pondering spiritual gifts and how it is that we keep becoming who we are in this season, these words from a song keep coming to mind:
Oh, this could be the part of you that you ain’t never seen before
Oh, this could be the part, the part of you, you wanna be*
It’s from a song by a folk duo called Johnnyswim, which is on my most-played Spotify playlist. It’s a song of encouragement (“Don’t let it get you down!”) combined with the vision that underlies the words I quoted above, which remind me: this thing that I’m learning to do at that moment, that I’m discovering how to do for the first time? Maybe it has something to do with who I am. How I’m made. Who I wanna be.
Do you see how this relates to the conversation we’re having in worship? We get glimpses of ourselves becoming who we are from any number of circumstances. Sometimes they’re things we wanted to try out, things we felt drawn to.
Sometimes we don’t realize an aspect of who we are until we stumble into it. I often say that about my experience as pastor of Women at the Well, the congregation at the women’s prison in Mitchellville, Iowa that I served for nine years. I wouldn’t have chosen that work. I said yes to it because of a confluence of circumstances that told me I needed to. Once there, though, I discovered so much about myself: layers of empathy and compassion that I would have denied I have; an ability to connect with other human beings across layers of difference; the heart of an advocate that hadn’t really awakened yet. There were hard things that often threatened to “get me down,” that sometimes turned out to be wrapped around “the part of me I want to be.”
A week from Sunday we’re holding an OpportunityFest that is intended to help people connect to ministries and possibilities that already exist here at the church, and also to inspire us all to wonder what we’re individually excited about that could connect to our life of faith in ways we haven’t noticed yet. As I said in my message last Sunday, I want us all to leave the places we serve here or in other aspects of our lives saying, “I can’t believe I get to do this for God.”
That is possible when we’ve been open enough, adventurous enough, and perhaps determined enough to find those ways of serving that will, actually, reveal to us who we are. Who we wanna be. How God made us, all along.
Click here and have a listen to the Johnnyswim song I mentioned above. I think you’ll be singing along before it’s done.
*lyrics by Josiah Bell / Abner Pedro Ramirez / Amanda Sudano Ramirez (2016) © Emi Blackwood Music Inc
