Giving Your Best and Lifelong Learning

Thinking about a presentation on lifelong learning I will make today to a group of religious leaders who engage in the addiction recovery process, I was struck by this reading from Howard Thurman in today's meditation guide (Shawchuck and Job, A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God, Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2003, 372):

• "It is one of the great insights of religion that only God is worthy of the best in one's treasure house and the best in one's treasure house is not worthy. . . . The urge to share as an offering of the heart that which has deepest meaning is at bottom the hunger for God. It is deep call unto deep. Offerings may be made to other human beings. . . . But such offerings do not satisfy, nor do they bring peace to the spirit. . . . [O]nly when the offering is seen as being made to the Highest, to God, however crude may be the altar upon which it rests, is the deep need in us all satisfied and our spirits come into the great Peace."

For those of us called to some kind of ministry to others, it is easy to fall back into easy contentment with they way we've been doing our work. The way we preach, the way we counsel, the way we administer, even the way we pray. But each new situation, every new sermon or client or organizational dilemma presents a new challenge and we are called, from deep within, to reach down deep and learn something new, try something better, meet the change with innovation.

Ministry in a changing world challenges each of us to bring new reflection on how to interpret our faith tradition and the situation, new insights about what we are called to be here and now, and fresh skills in the performance of our ministry to others. Not to offer it to those others alone, but to offer this moment's efforts to the source of our life and strength, to the highest, to the deepest, to the one in which we live and move and have our being.

As I thought about this the old Sunday School song came back to me from my childhood : "Give of your best to the Master." The words and the theology are truly awful, dripping in violent imagery. Yet it captures the insight that Thurman illuminates: nothing less than our best, however humble, and only God is worthy of such an offering. That's the path of peace.