Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [3]
I had remedies in place to help me keep my pace. I climbed the StairMaster at the gym. I paid monthly visits to a pastoral counselor. I planned vacations to exotic places where there were no telephones. Some guilt was involved in all but the first of these, since I had the idea that the practice of ministry alone should nourish me. Maybe I had read The Diary of a Country Priest too often, or maybe I was too much of a romantic, but I thought that God would keep depositing funds in my account whenever my balance got low. I thought that all I had to do was give myself fully to the work, and God would keep me in business. Instead, I was seeing a lot of corpses in the road, and telling myself they were not really there did nothing to diminish my grief.
On the night of the fire engine, when Ed saw where his life was leading him if he did not take a detour soon, I piggybacked on his prophecy. Maybe we could move someplace with fewer sirens and more trees, I thought. Maybe I could serve a smaller church with less complicated needs.
The next weekend we began taking day trips out of the city to see if we could imagine living anywhere else. The idea was to skip right over the suburbs and head for the countryside, but our requirements were such that our options were few. We needed some place with a vacant Episcopal church in it or at least an area where I could start one. We needed a town where Ed could move his engineering business and find some good people to work with him. We needed a sizable piece of land that suited us both, preferably with an old farmhouse on it. We needed to stay within driving distance of family.
We needed a lot.
Since we are both intuitive types, we do not decide things as much as we gravitate toward them. This is not very theological language, I know, but on the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.
When I read the stories in the Bible about people such as Sarah, Jacob, or David, what stands out is not their virtue but their very strong wants. Sarah wanted her son to prevail over Hagar’s son, Jacob wanted his older brother’s blessing, and David wanted Bathsheba. While these cravings clearly bought them all kinds of well-deserved trouble, they also kept these characters very, very alive. Their desires propelled them in ways that God could use, better than God could use those who never colored outside the lines. Based on their example, I decided to take responsibility for what I wanted and to trust God to take it from there.
Intuition may be one way of speaking about how God does that—takes things from here to there, I mean. Since intuition operates lower down than the frontal lobe, it is not easy to talk about how it works. In general, I tend not to pay much attention to it until I have completed all of my research, compiled my lists of pros and cons, and made a rational decision based on facts. Then, when I cannot sleep because the rational decision seems all wrong to me, I start paying attention to the gyroscope of my intuition, which operates below the radar of my reason. I pay attention to