Of all the figures in the Gospels, the one I have thought about most is not a person at all. It is the animal that carried Him into Jerusalem.
What my Sunday School teacher said
She told us that the donkey was not chosen for its strength, or its breeding, or because anyone had been keeping it for the purpose. It was chosen because it was tied up nearby and it was available.
I was a child who already suspected he was not being kept for any particular purpose. That landed.
The calling I could not take
I wanted to be a priest. I wanted it for years, with the steady undramatic wanting that does not go away when you stop thinking about it.
But I was the only son of parents who had nothing, and providing for them was not one option among several. So I went the other way — commerce, then accountancy, then the designations and the moves and the promotions. An ordinary life, chosen on purpose, for reasons I would choose again.
For a long time I treated that as a door closed. I have come to think it was a door opened somewhere I was not looking.
Being used up is not being finished
The thing about the donkey is that nobody wanted it and it was put to work anyway.
“No matter what others may say about you or how abandoned and rejected you may feel, God still needs you.”
I have repeated that sentence to more people than I can count, usually people who have decided that their own usefulness has expired. It is not consolation. It is a job offer.
Carrying Him where I actually go
What I could not do from a pulpit I have been able to do from an office, a kitchen table, a phone propped against a water jug.
The mission goes where I go. It went to England for the MBA and to Canada for the citizenship, and it turns out that a man with a spreadsheet and a YouTube channel can carry Him into more places than I would have reached in a parish.
I am not the vessel anyone would have selected. I am the one that was standing nearby and was willing to be untied.