Nearing the end of the fast--Strength

I talked to a friend last night.  In an email earlier in the week, I had told her about Q's angst and I told her that while he was being angsty I had him helping me remove stumps from the outdoor space I am going to slowly, but surely turn into a meditation space.  I also had him helping me weed the flower bed.  I had told her that I had thought about planting some vegetables this year, but realized that to do that I needed to do a lot more work in the garden area than I had time for, I didn't have what I needed  to be able to do it well, and I didn't want my garden to suffer this year like it did last year with my failed attempt at sunflowers.

She told me that as she read that paragraph, she could feel my soul screaming out in the metaphor.  That I was learning that I didn't have the basic foundation for what I wanted to do in my ministry.  And she is right.  My program isn't really giving me the foundation I need to be a minister.  It is giving me the foundation I need to research and create ceremony, and to operate as a business, but it isn't giving me what I need to be a good teacher.  I don't want to sell myself as a minister.

I could go on and on about how I have found this program I am in to be kind of a turn off because it is starting to feel like what I am learning to do is not be a minister, but to turn "minister" into a business.  I suppose I want to be someone who helps people who have been hurt by religion or who see it as unforgiving, fundamentalist, bullshit, that there is more to God and Spirituality than dogma.  But if I turn myself into a business, then I am no better than the money hungry evangelicals, I just preach respect and understanding, while demanding my fee because I have to make a living too.  I might be saying all the right words, but I am now an independent contractor demanding payment for my services.

Don't get me wrong, I want to (at some point) be able to make a living with my ministry whatever form it takes when I am ready, but I hope that I find a way to do that without seeming like the money is all I am after.

I digress, what my friend said about my soul calling out for a firmer foundation, stuck with me.  So I decided to do a shamanic journey/meditation and ask my guide what to do.  I found myself distracted by a million different thoughts that had nothing to do with anything.  I got frustrated, and I left the journey.  It has been happening like that more and more lately.  So much that I don't even consider doing journeys all that often anymore, and I love them.  Again, I digress, so I pulled out my angel cards (a set of cards with pictures of angels and words), and I as I shuffled them up I asked God to help me pull a word that would set my focus and help me answer the question of how I could go about setting up a better foundation for my ministry, for my calling.  All of the cards faced the same direction, but one.  So I pulled that one.  The word was Strength.

Strength?  Of course I need strength for a foundation of a ministry.  I thought, this is stupid.  I am getting nothing out of this.  Then it hit me, I asked about how I could go about setting up a better foundation...I need to build strength.  How do you do that?

Building strength in the physical world takes work and practice.  You can't just lift weights once a week and get stronger.  To really develop strength you have to work yourself to the point of breaking.  You have to work your muscles until they feel wobbly and shaky and like they are going to fail under the pressure.  My yoga teacher says that when we are doing a brand new balance posture, we had better be wobbling around, because if we aren't, our muscles won't learn how to hold us in place.

It kind of reminds me of a story I read about Biosphere 2, years and years ago.  The people who lived in the colony for a year, said that the trees in the rainforest kept falling over, like they were top heavy, and they couldn't figure out why because there was no wind.  That was when researchers started to understand that trees can appear to be extremely top heavy and remain standing because the movement caused by the winds that blow through the trees, causing them to "learn" to balance makes them stronger.  They develop the ability to stand in their top heavy form because they develop strength.

I suppose that all of this is my message that if I want the foundation I need to be a good minister, it is time for me practice building strength.  By doing whatever work is necessary to push myself to the limits of my abilities and build the muscle I need to move forward.