Using powers for good

I preached last Sunday. I may post the text at a later date. I worked with a stellar music and worship leading team and it turned out, in total, to be a moving service, if I do say so. And those last five words nearly did me in right up to the last minute. There is an invisible, shifting line between using your gifts and being proud or (ever the cardinal sin growing up) 'showing off'. I can't even tell you how much I second-guessed myself during the preparation for that sermon on this matter, not to mention the question of whether it was the right content, too fluffy, too severe, too short, too hypnotic, too weird, too self-serving etc etc. But, in the end, I decided to use my powers for good and second-guessed my second-guessing. I decided that if one sermon could cause me this much anxiety that must mean that I should do it. In my very sermon I wrote that God is not our accuser, and so I figured if my accusing voices were getting this bent out of shape about it, that meant I was challenging myself in a good way. This is just a glimpse inside my head. Aren't you glad you don't live there?
I was helped by two things; well, one message from two places (which always makes me pay attention). I'm moving beyond What I Usually Do and having to unearth skills I had buried, and in my healing class we learned about the mystics and how they went through a process of putting things down and picking other neglected things back up on their journeys. And, in non-coincidental reading in the surprisingly deep Getting Unstuck: a guide to discovering your next career path, which I'm currently Kindling, I also read helpful things like these below: note the spooky similarity.
A life impasse fulfills a specific purpose in our psychological development. It is a call to return to and integrate aspects of our emotional and psychological being that have been set aside because of competing life circumstances...
The first sense that we might be something other than the person we thought we were is always unsettling. Ego insists that there are indeed experiences to fear, and ego justifies our defenses...
Narrow roles come at a cost; other elements of our experience get tossed out in the sculpting of our particular identity from the totality of our full self...
The diabolic is, at its root, that which speaks against the human impulse to grow and experience life more fully.
Timothy Butler