And here's what I have for question number 2:
The second question that I hear is, “by doing this, aren’t you going against God’s will or plan for you?” Or, “isn’t what your doing unnatural?”
Yes it is true that I was born in a man’s body and not in a woman’s. It is also true that I was born with poor eyesight and high blood pressure. If working to make the first one more bearable is unnatural or against God’s plan for me, how can we say that the things I do to deal with the others are not?
Psalm 139:1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Who I am is no surprise to God. As the Psalmist says God is acquainted with all our ways, and just as I said earlier that God has the power to bring good out of bad, I also have faith that God plans for us as we are.
God’s plan for me includes that I am who I am. Getting stuck in wishing that things could be other than what they are is a human failing. God is a realist. God works with what God has.
This is a hard path, but God does not call us to always follow the easy path, nor has God ever promised us responding to God’s call will be easy.
We see time and again through out the biblical witness that Israel being God’s chosen people did not mean that they would never see hardship, that their path would always be easy.
As the great theologian, my mother, has asked, if being a Christian meant that bad things would never happen to us, how could we ever relate to the people we are supposed to carry the Good News to? How could we relate to them, how could we help them in their pain if we never know any pain ourselves?
We speak of there being two components to a call, a personal, inner sense of call that drives a person forward through this process, and a communal, external understanding that pushes that person along. Before I started dealing honestly and faithfully with who I am, my self-esteem and self-understanding were so low that I was relying almost exclusively on the second component. People I knew, people I trusted kept telling me that I was called to this work, and pushed me to come to seminary.
An amazing thing has happened since I living into my true identity: I have grown in confidence and have learned to see myself in a positive light, to believe that I can do this work and that I am called to it. I believe that this growth has been reflected in a great improvement in the quality of my sermons and in my ability to provide pastoral care. Until I could see myself as a person of value, I could never really treat others as valuable. What convinces me that I am following the right path is that the farther I have gone down this path the more sure I have become of my call.
I know that God knows me and has always known who I really am, even when I didn’t. Through both external and internal evidence I have come to believe that I have been called by God to the work of ministry. Those two things together say to me that there are people that God needs me to serve, as the person that God truly knows me to be.
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