How can you serve God in your daily life? Not everyone is called to ordination, though all of us are called to minister. The question is, how do you do that in the course of your everyday life? How do you minister while at home with your family, at work, in school?
The highest calling we can have, and the one that everyone has, is to model the life they were created to live. God created you to be joyful, peaceful, gentle, harmless, sinless; a perfect reflection of a perfect creator.
Suppose you were in a room with two people. One of them thinks of himself as shameful, fearful, guilty and sinful. This is what he believes about himself. He has made many mistakes in his life and all of them seem to prove these things about him. He wears his sins on his countenance, seeking to prove his humility and his deep regret. He lives in fear of retribution from an angry god.
The other person in the room has had a similar life, but has chosen to see his mistakes as errors to be corrected rather than sins that condemn him. He has forgiven himself, and those who were part of his life story. He wears his peace on his countenance, forgiving because he knows he is forgiven.
Which of these people do you think you would be drawn to? If you have a problem, who will you go to for an answer? Which one would you like to learn from? We are all ministers, but do we minister from God, or from our egos? God does not want our sacrifice, our fear, our guilt. We cannot minister for Him from these places.
God is a perfect God. How can we be a minister of God if we teach imperfection? And believe me, every word from our mouth and every action we take, and yes, even in our thoughts, we are teaching. It is never a matter of whether we teach; only what we teach.
I am ordained and have a formal ministry. But my ministry is not limited to those moments when I am in a church or when I am teaching or counseling. My ministry is 24/7, just as yours is. My ministry extends to my workplace. When I go to work, I bring my joy in being a child of God. I smile at my co-workers, and ask about their lives; not because I feel like I should, but because I feel God?s love flow through me as I extend it to others. I do it for the joy of that feeling.
God is Love and so I was created as love by Love. If I am not being love, then I forget who I am and in that forgetfulness I lose my joy. I guess I should say that I misplace my joy since I cannot lose what I am. I safeguard my joy by expressing my true nature.
At times I feel threatened by something going on at work. I become angry, frustrated, and fearful. When this happens, I lose my joy, and I am no longer teaching love. I am no longer ministering for God, but am teaching from ego. God is not angry with me for my forgetfulness, but He longs for me to bring my attention back to Him. He longs to share His love and His infinite joy with me. This is why He placed His loving and patient Voice in me, so that I can always find my way back to Love.
If I want to be true to my ministry, then I have to remember who I am. I am the perfect creation of a perfect God. I am joy. I am love. I am sinlessness. I am wholeness. I am fearlessness. Does this sound arrogant? Perhaps in the eyes of the world that has forgotten who created it, this does seem arrogant. And yet, in God this is merely the truth. Is it arrogant to accept myself as God created me? Or is it true humility to stand back from my own judgments of who I am, and to accept as truth that I am ever as God created me.
And honestly, who am I to say that I could be different than God created me? Now that is the height of arrogance, don?t you think? ?Yeah God, you just think you did a good job with me, but what do you know?? I don?t think so. If God were less than perfect, then He could have messed up, but then He wouldn?t be God would He? Or if I were more powerful than God, then I could change what He created into something else. I am not so arrogant that I believe I am more powerful than God.
So, when I act in a way that is not in line with the truth of myself, then I must be mistaken in who I think I am. This error is not one I want to teach, and so I call on God to correct my thinking; to remind me of my true nature. This is the call He has been waiting for and He always answers it. When I return to my true nature, I am again doing what I was created to do; I am ministering for God.
Relationships are a wonderful opportunity to minister. What better place to practice extending love than with those brothers I am with ?one to one?? It can be a relationship of the briefest nature; a clerk in a store, a driver at an intersection, a child on the sidewalk, someone I will never see again. How can I minister in such a short time? I can extend love through a friendly smile, a wave, a kind word. Even a loving feeling unexpressed is very powerful.
I have a relationship with everyone I come in contact with. More extended relationships offer more opportunities to extend love, and more opportunities to remember who I am. How do I minister within these relationships? I stand fast in my vision of who they are. I know that each of these people is the perfect representation of their Creator. I do my best not to be distracted by their errors, and when I am, I ask the Holy Spirit to redirect my thinking. In other words, I look past their story to the truth of who they are. I see only the Christ in them.
Here is an example of this selective vision. I ask my child to do me a favor and he doesn?t want to take the time to do it. If I see this through the ego, I will be hurt, angry. I will think about all the things I have done for him, and how could he begrudge me a little favor. I will blame him for the disappointment and sadness I feel. I will make him guilty, make him wrong. I have brought our relationship from the level of perfect love to a process of bargaining. I will act as if I love you, if you act as if you love me.
So what have I taught him? I have taught him that sometimes he is love and sometimes he is selfish, and so he is something that changes with the whims of my evaluation of him. I have taught him that he is not what God created, but rather what he does and how other people judge what he does. Would God have that be my ministry? And as I have taught him this erroneous view of himself, I have learned it of myself, because what I teach I learn.
If instead, I choose to see the Christ in him, it would be very different. I hear him say that he can?t do it, but I have no judgment of those words. I don?t see him as wrong. I don?t blame him for anything. I don?t look at him and see selfish, self centered. When I look at him, I see only a symbol of God?s perfect love, and my love for him is perfectly unchanged and unmoved. My peace is undisturbed. My joy is full.
And, I have taught him that he is love. I have taught him that he is as God created him, completely unchanged by any story of himself that he might believe in. And, I have, in the process, taught myself that I am as God created me, because it cannot be true of me unless it is also true of everyone else. To be perfect, everything God created must be perfect.
This is equally true of every situation. Every situation is perfect for me. It is a perfect learning and teaching situation. It is perfectly designed to bring me to salvation. If I choose to recognize that this is true, then I can take full advantage of the situation to be a minister of God. How I approach the situations in my life will teach others who I am, and by extension, who they are.
If I were to be faced with a decision about my future that seems momentous, I would have to make a choice of which voice I would listen to, which teacher I would learn from. There are only two voices. Will I listen to the ego, or to the Voice for God. If I choose the ego, I am teaching myself that this is what I am; the product of a capricious god who sometimes guides me into pleasure and sometimes into pain, who seems to have my best interests in mind at times and other times seems to be a cosmic jokester.
If instead, when making decisions, I look to my highest self (that Voice for God placed in me for that purpose) I can absolutely know that I will be guided gently and lovingly to the answer that is in my best interests. It could be no other way. If God is Love, then He can respond only with love. I can trust the answer I get from the Holy Spirit, and if it seems not to meet my expectations, I can know that it is my expectations that need to be adjusted.
I look at it like this: When I try to make decisions on my own, it is like I am looking at the world through eyes that see only what is directly in front of me. I don?t know what is to either side, or what is ahead. How could I make a good decision like that? How could I possibly know what would be the results of my decision; how it would affect me in the future, and how it would affect those in my life?
Instead, I could look with eyes that see in every direction at once, and see far into the future, that know every thing that has ever happened, and that will happen. This is what I am doing when I ask the Holy Spirit to guide me. If I am not certain of His answer, I ask Him to open the door I should go through, and to firmly close the door that I should avoid.
I know my ultimate goal is to return to my Father, and so I want every decision I make to bring me closer. The Holy Spirit and I are on the same page here, and He will always give me the answer that will move me in that direction. I do not judge what that answer looks like; I just know it is perfect.
So how does this work out for me? What kind of minister am I? Well, sometimes I do better than other times. But even my mistakes can be a part of my ministry. As I turn them over to God for correction, I am modeling how to deal with error. A Course in Miracles says, ?The Holy Spirit is not delayed in His teaching by your mistakes. He can be held back only by your unwillingness to let them go.? What a joyful way to go through life, knowing that I do not sin but only err, and that the Holy Spirit stands ready to correct all errors. All He needs is my willingness it be done. Being a minister of God asks no sacrifice on my part, and gives me all I could ask for; love, peace, and joy.
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