Friends,
Here’s a confession. It’s not always easy to think of something pithy and spiritually moving and—well—pastoral in my “Pastor’s Pen” spot. Sometimes my mind goes blank, and sometimes it’s too full of different ideas competing for space on the page.
The latter issue seems to have been the problem for me this week, and every time I thought maybe I was distilling my thoughts on, say, the nature of “Truth” or the importance of Surprise in the spiritual life, the phone would ring or I’d start jonesing for a cappuccino, or I’d get distracted by the need to push paper around on my desk, or my mind would wander off into how I might use John Calvin’s commentary on the sixteenth chapter of Book of Acts for my sermon next Sunday (spoiler alert: Calvin’s commentary on Acts 16 speaks of the importance of surprise in the spiritual life; listen for it on Sunday).
I was starting to despair: what if I never got my good, solid, pastoral, spiritually-minded, serenity-imparting, God-revealing column for the Contact? Then I realized that the Divine is as alive in the enjoyment of a cappuccino as She is in high minded thoughts about theological trivialities, and the ability to God in the act of doing paperwork or in conversations with friends, is an important part of the spiritual life.
So, in the end, a column about my writers’ block is really a column about God, or at least it can be, provided I’m willing to find God in the various distractions of a slow day in the office.
God’s Peace,
Ben