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Years ago, a Christian leader challenged a group of us to pursue discipleship hard–practice the spiritual disciplines, be on mission, make disciples, etc.–you know, the kind of things I write about in this blog! I asked him afterward what the role of the Holy Spirit was, especially in making disciples. His answer shocked me: “I don’t know.”

I’m still working on that question, but I got some insight today. A priest, reflecting on a mass he bungled through in Spanish but which resulted in a powerful experience for all who were there, wrote:

As I stepped back and soaked it all in, I realized how the Mass was so much greater than me getting the words right. The Holy Spirit was stirring. (From The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien.)

Ministry is more than our getting the words right. Maybe that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in.

When I was about 11 years old, a friend of my dad’s gave me a paint-by-number. Remember those? Well, I carefully filled in all the areas with the prescribed oil paints, and it came out looking something like the collie on the left. Then my mother, an artist, showed up. And when she finished blending the paints at all the borders, it looked more like the one on the right!

Maybe that’s the role of the Holy Spirit. He takes our crude efforts at using discipleship materials or teaching someone according to a template we were taught and turns it into something beautiful.

And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths. (1 Corinthians 2.12, 13, NLT)