In God's Hands

I have a lot of anxieties. In fact I’m a rather anxious person by nature. I worry about just about everything. So pretty much as soon as I when through clearness a little under a year ago for a call to ministry through writing I began to worry. My worries weren’t really founded in anything in particular, but they did cause me to pretty much freeze up inside. For a few months I totally spiritually froze refusing to open up to God at all in anyway without realizing that was what I was doing. I was like a small child curled up in bed under the covers in terror; terror of my calling and terror of the fact that I had publicly acknowledged that calling. Slowly though, through prayer and the ministry of other Friends I began to uncurl. Still my writing remained difficult and rare. Where as before my clearness committee my writing flowed through me much as vocal ministry in meeting did, after my clearness committee writing became slow and painful with me second-guessing myself at every step. What I should have done was seek out other Friends to help guide and elder me through my fears, but even the prospect of that was frightening. So I decided this fear of my own gifts and callings was going to have to be between myself and God. If God wanted my to minister in that way then God would have to see me through my fear so I could do it. I still attended Quaker functions, I still participate in Quaker life, I still spoke in Meeting, I still conversed with Friends but part of me, the part of me that my writing had come out of seemed to be listening instead of speaking. Slowly, over time my fear lessened. I began to write. At first the writing took the form of poetry, my first love. Over time though I began to write more like I had before I went through clearness. At Baltimore Yearly meeting I wrote three articles and edited an earlier piece within a twenty-four hour period. The writing I did then was incredibly easy, flowing through me almost faster then I could write it down. I was also filled with the overwhelming sense that what I was writing was Truth as I experienced it. At the end of writing one piece I sat back and realized I had no anxiety about what I had written. I did not feel the need to second-guess myself, or worry about how others would perceive my message; I had been faithful that was all that mattered. To me writing is serving God and if we trust serving God is our greatest