Marriage (continued)

I'm moving this from the comments section into the main blog in hopes that someone will see it... so read the comments from the first Marriage blog below, and (hopefully) respond somewhere.

-From the Comments-
I'm glad yall get where I'm coming from. I hate that the analogy of a messy car (kudos to the DP mention) fits my walk, cause my car is a mess way more than its clean. I hate admitting that thats true much of the time.

And I think that doing all the stuff that we do as Christians does often outweigh, or even wind up substituting the real relational work of getting to know God (any part) better.

Rachel mentioned the word steady, and thats how I feel a good deal of the time. But not steadily working hard in my walk like Jessica was talking about. Its more like floating around in the lake not really doing anything (also common in marriage).

Once the honeymoon period is over, is determination what drives you to push deeper, to stretch... to love better? Is it commitment? I'm not sure right now.

Little help?

Ambition

At some point before I was hired at Lake Arlington I had lunch with the youth pastor and the spiritual development pastor out there. I think it was a part of the interview process. Being hired at a church is a convoluted process. Anyway, the spiritual development guy's name is Eric. That is quicker to type. So Eric had some really good questions for me. I'm still thinking about some of them. Somewhere in the conversation, I asked about the dynamics between staff members at LABC. I probably wanted to take a bite of my delicious potato soup and needed someone else to talk for a minute. Somewhere in there he made the statement that alot of the guys on staff there were pretty ambitious.

I think ambition is good. I think aspiring to do great things is much better than the alternative of aspiring to do whats always been done, to never change, to be static and stagnant. But I've been chewing on the concept of ambition in ministry for a few months now. Its like a piece of over cooked steak that I'm not making much progress with.

Career is important for most people. Guys find alot of self worth in what they do. In many ways ambition is their driving force. In a normal job, like being a lawyer or something, you work toward the bigger and better job. However, in ministry, there is something really wrong about that being your motivation.

So, in the context of vocational ministry, what does it really mean to be ambitious AND to be in God's will? What does the Bible teach about that?