SERVICE: THE GREAT REFINEMENT There are so many things that they don’t dare tell you in seminary. I will soon celebrate twenty-one years as an ordained minister. I have been blessed to be ministering full time for all of these years, doing what I truly know I am meant to be doing. It is not a job or a career for me. It is my vocation. It is my life’s purpose that I happen to be paid to do. Though it was a circuitous route to the ministry I have never doubted the intuition that brought me here. I can clearly see that everything that I have been through in my life experience has helped prepare me for this form of service. Things that never made sense

MY EXPANDING WORLD Though growing older is often associated with limitation and a shrinking sphere of experience I am not personally finding that to be the case at all. There are certainly things that I used to be able to do physically that I can no longer do. There were a number of years when I averaged seven to ten dance classes per week while also hoofing it in eight performances of a musical. That seems a long time ago now for sure. My pace may have slowed but I am gratefully more present to what I am choosing to do, and the decreased speed has heightened my attention to the wonders I am sure I used to race right by. I have found that rather than

THE PAIN THRESHOLD It is only in retrospect that I recognize the incredible threshold for pain I seem to have been born with. Or at least so it seems. From this perspective in consciousness I marvel at the decades I spent living in a self-inflicted and agonizing story of diminishment and unworthiness. I literally lived inside of a just out of awareness container of self-reproach and self-loathing. Oddly enough it was so pervasive that it has given me a firm and deep knowing of the power of Grace. The fact that I still managed to have some level of happiness and success is only a God-thing. Of course there is also the issue of heavy self-medicating which is beyond the scope of this reflection. The ability to