Untamed Faith

After finishing nearly five years of pastoral ministry, I decided to walk away from it for a time, choosing to focus on school and other employment opportunities in the city. I will be the first to admit that I do miss it. I mean, in 10 years of work experience Pastoral ministry encompassed half of that. Now my life is in a different season and it feels weird. Brenda and I have settled into a local CoB congregation and believe that is where we are to be for now. Even though for me it doesn’t feel like A Place Apart or Taize. So after nearly two months of unemployment I finally found something that looks like it will work for a time but all the while I keep looking back at my time in the church. It’s funny how you can simultaneously hate it and miss it in the same breath.

I mentioned in an earlier post that living in the city does not agree with me at all. Maybe that is why my spiritual journey of late has resembled the same sentiment. In a book that I have been reading on the side, I found a bit of wisdom by Howard Macey that really encompassed my journey of late:

“The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and we who
live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.”

Many of you know (if you’ve talked with me or read this blog) that I am experiencing what I can at best call Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD) and believe it to be the longing that God is instilling in me to pursue my heart’s desire. I have to get away and do my Vision Quest or get to Tracker School by the end of next summer. To make a long story short, I feel as though I am being held captive by a suburban faith when all along it needs to be dwelling on the frontier, untamed by culture and the church. I’ll get deeper into that in my next post or so. Are there any of you that feel the same way?