If I worry in any existential way, it's about the amount of time I've wasted, and the chance that I could reach the end of my life and conclude that I might have taken the wrong turn at some point, and there was another place where I could have been more use. This is not to do with any problem of faith - that's a separate business - but it might be to do with my fitness to be a parish priest, as sometimes it feels that I'm no good at it at all. When we went on our ordination retreat from Staggers at Alton Abbey, the retreat conductor Bishop Timothy Bavin told us, among other gems such as the advice that there was no shame in going to sleep under the table if a meeting got particularly pointless and boring, that we might well conclude at some point that the Church had made a dreadful mistake in ordaining us, and if so we should (as a first resort, anyway), try to recall that despite appearances the Holy Spirit knows better than we do and that God would honour the call and equip us with what we needed even if something had gone awry with the process. I try to hold on to that. I suppose we all have shadow selves, paths we might have trodden and routes we could have taken had things been different, and we can't pursue them all.
Tomorrow's Gospel is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew, the labourers who get paid the same by the landowner regardless of how late in the day they turn up. Perhaps I regret not getting going in my Christian life earlier, but then again maybe that brings me some insights I wouldn't otherwise have had. All in the end is harvest, and the Lord can work with the least we bring him, no matter how late we arrive.
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