A Presbyterian Leader blog post by Peggy Hinds
“Where the hunger of the world beyond you meets the hunger
of the world within you: may you find yourself in this place.”
This is a blessing from a devotional book by Jan Richardson, In the Sanctuary of Women (p.32). (I am grateful to my dear friend and colleague, Betty Meadows for giving me this book. It is not only spiritually appealing, but also thought-provoking.) The entry that includes this blessing draws from Buechner’s famous quote, “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” As a life and leadership coach, I find Richardson’s writing about hunger to be very engaging.
Richardson’s questions are helpful to leaders who aspire to grow in their depth of being and leadership ability.
- What are you hungry for?
- What do you desire, and what desire lies beneath that desire – or within it?
- What does your wanting teach you about yourself; about what you love, what you fear, what is possible?
- How does your longing meet the world’s longing?
- How do you pray with your desire?
Many leaders have trouble answering these types of questions, myself included. My answer to “what do you desire?” is often “to have clarity about what I desire.” Sometimes we think we know what we want, but by asking the harder questions, we discover that what we think we want is only surface desire. If we dig deeper, we discover deep gladness.
It can be difficult to lead a group of people (like a congregation) into understanding God’s desire for them until we have a better idea of God’s desire for ourselves. People look to their leader(s) for guidance in discerning and following God’s will. Spiritual discernment doesn’t come naturally for most of us. We are accustomed to having someone give us the answers and tell us what we are supposed to believe. How can we tell someone else what they believe, or what their deepest desires are? Of course, we cannot. We can ask good questions and model discernment.
Discernment is a practice. One cannot simply read books on how to discern and then teach it to someone else. A leader who wants his/her parishioners to be equipped for spiritual discernment has to practice this in his/her own life first. We need to be able to ask ourselves questions like the ones Richardson suggests. The gift of discernment is that we do not have to have the answers; in fact, we cannot have them, because everyone has to answer these kinds of questions for themselves.
Where the hunger of the world beyond you meets the hunger of the world within you—may you find yourself in this place.
Comments