In the midst of all the ugliness and sadness of this week I had my first meeting with my discernment committee in regards to discerning my call to ministry. You can read about my call to ministry here and here.

I can't believe how painstakingly slow this has been so far. I am certainly exercising my gift of patience during this process.

The first meeting was more just getting to know the other members of the committee. Two are from presbytery and I had never met them before and they had no clue who I was. The contents of the meetings are confidential, of course as each person on the committee shares information about their faith journey, beliefs, and personal life.

I did learn that in the past this process was called 'Testing the Faith" and I can see how it used to be called that. I was on the hot seat for the whole 2 hours! & I'm going to be on the hot seat for the next 5 sessions (which is the minimum number of sessions...it could be more). The handbook we are following has many tough and personal questions in it that I will have to address.

We've scheduled our next meeting and I have some homework and quite a bit of reading to get through for our next meeting which is the first week of April. I've ordered the books and 1 is supposed to be here tomorrow. I'm so excited!