Welcome to the Infinitely Precious Podcast produced by Infinitely Precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's an opportunity for us to join together again in the Infinitely Precious podcast. Thanks so much for being my companion. And I encourage you, invite you, if you will, to invite others to join us on this. You can certainly share the podcast if you find it meaningful in your own life with others.

If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that two weeks ago, I began with a new series of podcasts. I have practices that I use in my own life, the ripening practices. And I've done the first two with you and I intend to continue on through talking about the ripening practices, what I see them as, etcetera. But today's podcast is also a significant day for me. Today is July 1 marks forty years actually a little less than forty years, a little more than forty years, but it's forty years of ministry.

Thirty eight being appointed by bishops to serve churches and two years when I served, really two and a half years when I served churches on staff before there was an appointment, before I was licensed, before I became an official pastor, if you will. Now you might expect me to talk about this and it's also the ninetieth podcast in the Infinitely Precious podcast series. But setting that aside, you might expect me to ask the question, what have I learned in forty years? And well, that's an interesting question, I suppose, and a fairly normal question when you look back on the years. What I'm more interested in as a question, what really rises for me is who have I become in these forty years?

What has ministry revealed about me? What does the work I've done reveal about me as a person? I think that's the question that really matters. When I began ministry, I was quite young. I started working when I was 20 years old and was appointed, went to a licensing school and was appointed for the first time as a 20 year old as a pastor, the associate pastor of a church.

And in those days, I kind of had thoughts about having watched pastors all my life, which was not that long at that point, about twenty years, do what they did. So I thought preaching, teaching, leading ministries and Bible studies, visiting the sick, those hospitalized, officiating at funerals and at weddings. Those were the kinds of things. Dressing a certain way, acting a certain way, and carrying a kind of biblical authority around with me. It's what I imagined in those years.

I've come to see it differently over that time. I've come to see myself differently over that time. The struggle to try to check all the boxes became unfulfilling for me. So and it kind of burned me out. I worked so hard to make sure I checked every single box rather than attending to the person who was behind all the box checking, I took a three year break because the box checking wasn't enough.

And I began to think that maybe this vocation, this calling, something we all have, mine I imagined at the time had been ministry, ordained ministry, it wasn't what I thought it was. Particularly if it was checking a bunch of boxes because I just came out on the other side tired. So I took three years off and I tried a lot of other kinds of things, none of which fully worked for me. There were opportunities to be engaged with people, trying to sell things to people, trying to help people understand the benefits they had in another setting, trying to provide an insight for other people at those points. And in the end, after some therapy, I came back around to recognizing that perhaps it wasn't so much that I wasn't called to this as that my own kind of perfectionism, Getting caught up in doing everything exactly right and imagining that doing everything exactly right was checking boxes was not fulfilling, but being present with people was.

Being around. And so through the therapy, through working through my own perfectionism, I'm a recovering perfectionist, letting go of some of those things and continuing to let go of those things. My understanding of what I was about began to change. And so forty years later from forty plus years later from when I began doing this ministry, no longer think it's about the doing. It's about the person who is doing the doing.

It's about being who I am as I practice ministry. There is no other pastor like me. If you have a pastor, a different pastor somewhere, there is no other pastor like them, him or her, they. Each one of us is meant to reflect who we're meant to be. Not just if we're pastors, not just if we're podcasters, not just whatever you do with your life, you are meant to reflect something unique about you in the way that you do it because you are bringing you to what you do.

I am bringing me to this. And so suddenly, as I reflect on forty years, not so much what it taught me, but who it has revealed that I am matters the most. If I were to say aloud what I think my purpose in this world is now and to try to refine it down to a simple thing, it is to love others, to love this world and others without limit. And to help people feel seen for the gifts that they are, for the person that they are, to be truly seen. Not as their function but as their person.

What these years have revealed to me about who I am is that when I am performing the functions, doing the functions that come with the work that is called pastoral ministry, I get to be me in the most full way when I sit with someone who is struggling with faith. I get to be me in the fullest sense of who I am when I preach a sermon, when I teach a class, when I go with the youth and adults on a mission project this year, Appalachia Service Project. When I work on those sites, I get to be me digging holes or helping to build a safer, warmer, drier place for the person whose home we're working on. I get to be me in those places, no matter where I'm sleeping or what I'm doing, doing that as me. And it seems to me forty years has revealed to me that the best any of us can do in this world is do what we do as ourselves.

There are lots of clicheous things that you can say, be yourself, everybody else is taken, all that kind of stuff. But the truth is you reveal the divine image. I reveal the divine image in a unique way. Since the divine image is infinite and I am pretty sure I'm finite, as are you, I can only reveal an aspect. I make it sound like it's it is a limit.

I I in my finitude, I reveal an aspect of that eternal grace. And the best I can do is learn to reveal myself as in the functions, in the practices I put forward. In the way that I preach, in the way that I teach, in the way that I do mission, in the way that I answer the phone, in the way that I send emails or talk to people one on one, do premarital counseling, officiate weddings and funerals, that is a reflection of who I am. Are there certain words we say? Absolutely.

But those words are shaped by the individual relationship and connection that each one of us feels in those moments. I can't go back forty years to the beginning and do it again because I think that I had to learn through failing and through self illusion, delusion about what ministry is, what my calling was, what vocation looks like. It's not just a list of tasks, it's performing them as myself in an everyday life. It wouldn't change anything because I didn't know myself forty plus years ago. The gift that life has given me over time is knowing myself more, knowing what it looks like to be grounded in the eternal, to connect more deeply with the divine, not to know more than anybody else about the divine, but to know the divine in a personal connected way, part of the very tissue of who I am.

So while this has been a personal reflection, I think there's a lot that can carry over into all of your lives, my companions on this journey. Be you. Be you. The way that you do whatever it is in your life you are doing, don't just let it be a task. Bring yourself as much as is possible to what you are doing because you are the gift.

Not the job you're doing is the gift, but the way you do it. We've all encountered people who we just feel are doing what they do and it feels so natural that they're doing it. And we've also encountered people who are doing something that feels it feels like there's a disconnect, a dissonance in the way they do it. It's not that they're bad people necessarily, It is that they are not living themselves out in whatever it is they find themselves doing. Life reveals us.

Sometimes it breaks us in the things that happen to us. God sustains us in all of those moments. And the way we emerge on the far side of that allows us to see more fully the divine in ourselves, in our neighbors, in the world in which we live, and the universe beyond, the connectedness of all things. So in this ninetieth podcast, in this anniversary of forty plus years of ministry, in this stepping away from a series that I was doing, I want to invite you to remember what a gift you are. You are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

Bring the gift of you to life. Figure out who you are. Look for the way you reveal yourself in the way that you work, in the way that you play, in the way that you converse. And let that person shine forth. What a gift it would be.

Oh, infinitely precious friends and companions on this journey, I wish you all the best. Be you. It's a true gift. Until the next time.