catching his breath

Finish the sentence. Ministering means…

Ministering means helping others find thin places. I first read about thin places in a book by Marcus Borg. It stuck and I haven’t let go of the concept. Thin places exist when heaven and earth come wonderfully close to slamming together, where only a trace of humanity’s fall remains. They are moments when a person can sense the divine within the mundane. They are experiences where things of earth seem flooded by the energy of heaven. In the moment of a thin place, a person can feel the tug of God’s presence.

Imagine you were injected with liquid metal and studded with magnetic particles. Now envision that throughout the day you were required to pass between a sheet of metal and a life-sized magnet. Both warp and lunge your direction as you walk through. You feel the impending collision ahead of time as each piece forces millions of invisible, molecular particles into your path. That’s the force of thin place.

Prayer. A certain song. A smile. Birth. That old recliner. A lover’s embrace. A glass of wine shared among friends. Psalm 23. Worn spots in the shroud of humanity’s fall.

Ministry, then, ought to encompass an intentional effort to lead others into thin places. It is God alone that can heal and mend broken hearts, and in a fallen world that bars his full disclosure we must encounter him at the thin spots, at least for now. So I understand ministers as once-broken veterans of thin place exploration, discoverers of the renewing force of God’s presence, who go back and share their discoveries with those now-broken.