Resuming my Gifts and Callings, which were Not to be Hidden under a Bushel

The restoration of my callings, after the break to pursue my own pride, was started, ironically, by the Board’s expert psychologist at a Board of Law Examiners’ hearing in December 2006–near the beginning of the four year break. He testified that my condition had been under medical control for over 20 years, and there was no reason I shouldn’t be admitted to the Bar. But, in response to a question from a member of the Board whether he would add anything to what my treating doctor was already doing, he said yes, he would add a 12-step program. That answer sealed the doom of my application, by revealing that my developmental disorder wasn’t permanently “cured,” although I tried to get that changed for the next four years. But it also started me looking for a 12-step program appropriate to my issues. That led to Celebrate Recovery, which seems to be the place where at least one of my callings would finally develop.

Jesus said:

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:14-16

God has a strange sense of humor. He says that my light can’t–or, possibly, shouldn’t–be hidden, and then gives me light to show in ways that either, according to the world around me (including often those around me in the Church), MUST be hidden, or, if shown, are certain to be disbelieved. Still, I cannot hide. I cannot hide from God, like Adam tried to hide, once he came to know evil, sewing fig leaves to cover the way God made him and diving for the nearest shrubs to keep God’s eyes and voice away from him. If I do try to hide, there are consequences for me, beyond others not seeing the light. As Jesus extended the same metaphor in Luke 8:

No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.

Luke 8:16-18.

What I am hiding WILL be found out. And I will ultimately lose it, when I am shown for the coward I am. In fact, Jesus takes this same metaphor one step further in Luke 11–if I hide the light he gives me, the light within me will become darkness:

No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.

Luke 11:33-36.

Now for God’s sense of humor. God has given me gifts and callings which I have kept mostly or wholly hidden because, given the circumstances of my life, doing anything else appeared ridiculous (and also appeared likely to expose me to ridicule or punishment). I have long known that I have a gift of teaching. But, with the exception of a brief and ill-timed stint as a pastor (a gift I definitely lacked at the time), I have confined my exercise of this teaching gift to being a writer of little-read websites, one little-read book circulated in the wrong way, and being an assistant/understudy Sunday school teacher. Given my lack of formal theological teaching credentials (toward which every effort I have heretofore made has been blocked) and the evils of my past, of public record, any role beyond these has seemed preposterous–I believed my message “would not be accepted”–and quietly resisted by me. This was really my pride speaking again. If openly using what I have been given is likely to gey me ridiculed, punished, or–even worse–simply ignored because of my disqualifications, I have chosen not to risk exposing my pride to that. I have also, at times, been discouraged by others in authority from seeing myself in any role beyond these very minimal roles.

But then we got into that small Charismatic church during the 1990s. I let both my calling as a teacher, and my disqualifications, be known. Next thing I know, it seems, I am having hands laid on me in a licensing ceremony in 1994 in which a group of Charismatic and independent Pentecostal ministers in Topeka licensed me to the ministry as a (part-time, volunteer) Assistant Pastor at Topeka Faith Center. At the same time, this assembled body of ordained ministers, while laying their hands on me, prophesied that I had been given a gift of healing, of a very specific kind–I was to have the gift of healing those bound by mental, emotional and spiritual diseases. The entirely ironic thing about this prophecy was that, at the time this gift was prophetically announced, it had been barely a year since the Kansas Supreme Court had agreed with the Kansas Board of Law Examiners that I ought not be admitted to a license as an attorney in Kansas for the precise reason that I had been diagnosed with a mental illness in the past (no one suspected it was really an autism-spectrum developmental disorder until 6 years later) and had been unable to prove that condition “cured.” A year after that, at my ordination ceremony, many of those same ministers reaffirmed this gift, which I did not have any idea how to use until about 2011!

Perhaps my ignorance of how to use the gift resulted from my unwillingness to use it while others in authority thought of me as an uncured, and incurable, nut? Or from pure fear of openly contributing to the healing of others, while I could still be accused of being mentally ill? At any rate, not long after that, I was put in a sink-or-swim situation: my mentor, the Pastor of Topeka Faith Center became terminally ill and resigned, leaving me as Pastor-by-default of a congregation that quickly shrunk away. Instead of swimming, I sank, hampered by my feeling that I could not honestly use my most important gift until I had the approval of others, and could no longer be accused of being ill myself.

But, if I now correctly understand the scriptures I quoted above, my true healing (regardless of what the Bar might say), would have come through using my gift to heal others. The lamp, placed on it stand, gives light to my eyes, too, and, through them, to my whole body.

I went through one later, similarly futile, paroxysm of trying to prove my non-defectiveness to the Bar in 2006, as I already mentioned. Then about 2010 I gave up, permanently. I’m not going that way again. But while practicing law is not God’s ultimate design for me, I should never have given up on my gifts, the ones God gave me. I have continued to do some teaching. I am beginning to understand my encounter with prophecy in the early 2000s, an am again open to it. And I only started to use my specialized healing gift after a few years in Celebrate Recovery–where, at present, I use it by sponsoring others and sometimes leading small groups through the steps. It’s not functioning as the kind of gift that was likely on the minds of those who ordained me–i.e, a highly dramatic, lay my hands on the sick and they instantly become well sort of gift. But it is very real. God has his own way of doing things.