Calling Diane ....part 2

So... i was last talking about my message, call, direct invite... from God. I mentioned that my day had started with reading an email and homily that the good Rev Dr Tembeckjian had written for the prior week.

Now that was the first thing that I did that morning... before getting out of bed... read her email and her sermon.

That was, I do believe, the first call from God.

At first,I heard it as Good Morning..someone loves and cares about you, I did not hear it as anything more or less. I was certainly not hearing it as God speaking to me. Not then.

Her homily, as I read it that morning, made me think but in all honesty I did not read it deeply.

But later... I was drawn to read it again,

I have now read it every single day since receiving it.Some days ...more than once.

It starts out with the story of Willie Loman.

Now you gotta love a priest who starts out her first Sunday of Lent Sermon with Death of a Salesman! That's not the typical way to go.

It got my attention.

I am a firm believer that what we get out of a sermon is what we need at the time. Call it divine intervention, Call it a panacea for the masses. Call it fate. Call it anything you want.

For me, it was part of the call from God. Direct and pointed. I have had several. That day. This week. One of many.

Rev.Dr. T gave me the wake up and I chose to briefly shake it off.

However, when i started to really listen I thought how perfect the Willie Loman character was for me to focus on.

Willie Loman, a tragic figure who chooses to end it all rather than live in to who he really was. He had a vision, an ego, about who he was supposed to be and without that...he felt his life was not worth living. He could not envision anything other than what he thought his life should look like.

The lectionary reading for that week was about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. She goes on to talk about the fact that we all enter this wilderness at different points in our lives. Often, it is when we least expect it. Often, it is just as we think we have it all figured out. Then BOOM... there we are, sitting in the wilderness, walking alone, dodging one temptation after another.

Temptations come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties.

Often it is the ones we put in our own way that really trip us up...the subtle ones..the internal ones.

For Willie Loman it was not knowing what he was good at...letting his misguided ego reduce his life to a failure when in fact maybe...just maybe ... he just hadn't found his niche.

His struggle was within himself, in his mind, a war within.

For Jesus, in the wilderness, it was the temptation from Satan. It was the temptation he felt as he examined his own life, as he realized just exactly what his life would be... what he was being called to do.

For all of us the struggle to discover who we are and what we are called to do can be life affirming.

Conversely, this struggle in the spirit of introspection can also move us further away from God.

It can be our wilderness walk. It can be our temptation.

As Rev Dr T says..."Such contemplations are not easy."

"Such contemplations are devil enough".

But then it is all part of the journey... Isn't it?