How Hard Can It Be?

As a fairly frequent viewer of the BBC programme Top Gear  I quite often hear one of the three presenters, usually Jeremy Clarkson, when presented with a preposterous challenge (like making an amphibious car that actually works) declare “How hard can it be?”  The answer usually turns out to be “very”.

When people ask me what I do for a living I always tell them that I’m training to be a Methodist Minister.  When they get confused as ask what a Methodist Minister is I usually tell them that it’s like being a vicar only in the Methodist Church rather than in the Church of England.  They then invariably say something along the lines of, “That’s an easy job. You only work one day a week” or “That’s an easy job, you spend all week talking and drinking tea.”  These statements are, of course, untrue on a number of levels.

There is a grain of truth in the above paragraph, of course.  Methodist Ministers do drink a lot of tea/coffee/other beverage of choice. 

The biggest untruth is that being a Minister is an easy job.  Well, first of all it isn’t a job at all; it is something you become full time.  You don’t get home at 6pm and stop being a minister for the rest of the day.  It isn’t like that.  You don’t get paid for doing it either.  The Methodist Church will give me a stipend, not for the work I do for the church, but in order to enable me to be free from the need to earn an income some that I can give my time to the church.

It isn’t easy, either.  It’s very hard.  In fact I’d go so far as to say it is virtually impossible to be an effective minister; virtually impossible if we rely purely on our own strength and resources anyway.

One thing I have learnt over the course of my Christian journey is that whenever I try to do things for God using purely my own strength and resources I will find it very, very hard and will eventually end up coming to God on my knees anyway and asking for His help and guidance.  I’m not saying that when I rely on God things suddenly become easy because they often don’t, but having God right in there with me, helping me, guiding me and empowering me does make a huge difference.

If I try to do ministry on my own it will be very, very hard but if I rely on God, on His guidance and strength, then I know that I can achieve anything he wants me to as I seek to serve him as a Probationer Presbyter in the Methodist Church.