Today is the twentieth anniversary of my ordination. I recall that, at the time I stood before the members of the parish in Potter, Neb., and made my vows, I felt a mixture of accomplishment and apprehension. I was pleased to have reached this milestone in my professional life, but I also was unsure about how I would fare in my first call as a parish pastor. The truth of the history is that I experienced a mixture of success and failure in my parish ministry.

For the first time in a number of years, I re-read the liturgy of ordination. One of the phrases that struck me was the response I made to each question Bishop Dennis Anderson asked me, “I will, and I ask God to help me.” Right there might lie, in a way, the explanation for that mixture of success and failure I experienced in the parish. Whenever I acted on the basis of my will, I believe I had a tendency to head toward failure. But when I acted faithfully and with God’s help, I achieved success. Perhaps not success as the world would define it, but success as seen through the eyes of faith.

Another spot in the liturgy fills me with confidence, not in my abilities, but in God’s capacity to use me to bring him glory and to further his will in the world. When Bishop Anderson and Pastor Bill Conrad laid their hands on me, Bishop Anderson prayed,

Eternal God, through your Son, Jesus Christ, pour out your Holy Spirit upon David Michael and fill him with the gifts of grace for the ministry of Word and Sacrament (Occasional Services, Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1982, p. 196).

I’m comforted by those words, because they claim that the ministry I carry out depends finally upon the gracious outpouring of the Holy Spirit and not upon my own skill or cleverness or eloquence. Perhaps this is way I was struck by the reading from 1 Peter in today’s Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours. As the Apostle writes,

Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 4:10-11a, NRSV).

I am praying to be obedient to God in my calling and my daily life, so that of each action and thought, I can rest in the assurance that God will help me.

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.