To the Nunnery with Piebald Questions

A couple of years ago I realized that I needed to get me a nun.

One of the challenges of being in full-time ministry is finding older folks who are willing and have the time and space to help sort through things in my own life. At one point over a six-month span, I heard several cool speakers and a couple other IV staff talk about their nuns--older women nuns that they met with on a regular basis that gave them spiritual direction. One staff even mowed grass in exchange for monthly meetings.

I wasn't exactly sure where to find my nun. It's not like there's "rent-a-nun" section in the yellow pages. So I prayed for several months, maybe over a year. And the Lord gave me a nun. His name is Doug Stewart. While he's not technically a nun, he is a wise, godly, older man who is gifted in the art of spiritual direction. We talk about once a month and he helps me sort through the noises of my soul.

One thing Doug has helped me to do is press through my surface-level questions to consider what the deeper questions are: what's the question BEHIND the question? In the case of my piebald tension and the question of my work and God's work I posted on yesterday, there are bigger questions that drive my angst that are pretty significant: do I matter to God? is my work important? am I valuable?

When those questions are exposed, I can begin the healing at a deeper level, a more satisfying level. I am no longer treating outer symptoms but I'm getting to the roots of the issues. I also begin to see where I'm asking the wrong questions.

This is important because everyone has places of angst in their lives that then gets worked out in our walk with God. Thankfully most of the people who read this blog aren't in full-time ministry. So your places of surface-level tension or angst are probably not the same as my piebald tension. But the key thing is not the exact outworkings of our angst but to press through whatever places of tension or conflict exist and begin to ask: what's the question behind this question? What are the issues that are really driving this concern/problem/issue?

And when we get to those places, we usually realize that we're both much better off and much worse off than we ever really thought we were. And then the real healing and transformation begins.