Heart's desire
For months, at the urging of my spiritual director, I have been praying to find my heart’s desire, to find that thing (not a person—I have those) that inspires me, energizes me; my flow. But you pray for something long enough, and the prayer goes unanswered, and eventually you stop praying for the thing.
The last few months have found me in the doldrums. (Excellent word, by the way, with possible origin in the words dull and tantrum.) Yes, you could say I’ve been having a dull tantrum for a season, the result of an unusually warm summer, a not-fun spring at church, and continued physical pain as my hip heals more slowly than I would like. Plus sometimes I’m just a big baby.
And then I got an idea. I would write a book, a novel, about a church, because I am the First Pastor Ever to think about writing a novel about a church. I thought about it all spring, and I thought about during our first week of vacation, and I thought about it some more the week our kid was at sleep-away camp. And then I went away for a week, to the lovely shores of Lake Tahoe with a plum assignment of leading worship once a day.
