How Saul Lost Some Donkeys and Found More Than He Bargained For

How Saul Lost Some Donkeys and Found More than He Bargained For
1 Samuel 8: 21- 9: 27

A friend of mine begins his church ministry tomorrow, fifteen years after he first had a sense that he might be called to the ministry. Of course he has been involved in ministry in different senses through most of those fifteen years, but he has now been officially appointed to a church (and it is going to pay him a salary!). Last night we were comparing notes about calls to the ministry and found overlaps and differences. For us both, the story went back to our midteens, the time when we first took Christian faith seriously. He had wondered about ministry then because he somehow thought it was the only way to take Christian faith seriously. Eventually he came to see that there was a sense in which this was true but also a sense in which it was false, and only later did a pastor suggest to him that his gifts might indeed indicate he was called to ministry in the more technical sense. Although I got interested in theology as a teenager, I somehow knew that a call to the ministry was a different matter, and I knew I didn’t have such a call. But subconsciously I was probably looking for something—not lost donkeys, but an idea about what to do with my life. One day I got caught in the rain and sheltered in a doorway, and out of the blue (or out of the rain) suddenly came a conviction: God wants me in the ministry...