Rock and a hard place

There’s no one that can tell you what is right for your life. There is no one that can assess your situation and recommend a path to follow. There is no one thing that when you do it must turn out well.

Except to give yourself to your potential – to give yourself to that which is fundamentally true in your life, to give yourself to love and to become an agent of some higher meaning.

I suppose our journeys are about finding, discerning, and discovering what exactly we mean by higher meaning.

Once finding that connection to higher meaning, we search for the vehicle to get us there. It is at this point in this physical, human-constructed world that competing realities converge in the moment as credentialing agencies vie for authority of anointing the seeker to their emerging path. Not wanting to vague, in the future profession that I seek, it is the Unitarian Universalist Association and their Department of Ministry that determines whether I have the authority to be a community minister in affiliation with them. They have a series of rules, hoops as they are called here at Starr King School for the Ministry, which a person must jump through.

Up to this point I have been allergic to their rules that tell me that I cannot be a minister in my own community after I achieve my ministerial degree. I bang into this reality continually, most recently in writing a grant for the Fellowship to be chosen as a recipient of growth funds within the district and the funding of an internship there. The application was not awarded to the congregation right now, among other reasons, because of a rule that a student cannot intern in their home congregation.

And now, in this moment, I question whether I need to be a credentialed minister at all to do that which I am called to do. Again, I wrestle with the concept about whether my quest to be a community minister is about the title or simply doing the work and living the spiritual life that I seek.

While the process is distressing in this moment, I have a trust that I will make my way through these questions to the end I seek.

In photography, I have learned that I have to work within the limitations of the particular lens that I am looking through and frame the best image I can.

Perhaps it's a truism that we can apply to many situations in our lives.