A problem with humility? I don't really know.

I need some advice (which I ain't gonna get, because nobody else reads this blog anymore!)

I am really struggling in my Christian walk because of a lack of serious fellowship with other mature men, and from a lack of opportunity to teach substantive adult Sunday school classes.

I was an elder in my previous church. I had frequent fellowship with the other elders that provided the serious, masculine, iron-sharpening-iron that I desperately long for. And I was a Sunday School teacher who taught a rather vast array of serious theology-rich classes.

None of that is available to me anymore, and not likely ever to be again. It just isn't going to happen in my new church.

I know what this sounds like--because I've heard it a million times: I have gifts, why doesn't God let me use them? If as an elder I was ever less than sympathetic to this question--please forgive me. Now that I'm walking in your shoes I have first-hand insight to what you are going through.

Here is the truth. I'm a good teacher. A really good teacher. I may not be much good at anything else, but I have always been a good teacher.

So is it vanity that is eating me alive? It might be. On the other hand I was never: I'm an elder and and adult Sunday school teacher, so that's how I serve. I was happy also to serve in the more behind-the-scenes ministries as well (including years in the nursery, in which I routinely observed the relativistic phenomenon known as time dilation.)

But even that self-defense might just imply more vanity. I don't know, I really don't.

My study of the Word was so much richer and extensive when I was preparing to teach, and when I was meeting with the elders. These days I feel it a struggle to put a minimal effort into reading.

How do I replace what was lost?