On Good Friday of 2022, I broke my wrist, although it would take me time to figure out that I had broken it. By the end of April of 2022, we were in the process of buying our Lutheridge house.
I was also thinking about a year ago, when I would have been having the conversations that would lead to my current work position, conversations about becoming the Synod Appointed Minister (SAM) for Faith Lutheran and my teaching job at Spartanburg Methodist College. Last night I was thinking about how situations I thought would be temporary are being extended. I am trying not to wish it could be permanent.
Of course, it might be more permanent than I've been thinking it could be. In terms of Faith Lutheran, much of the future isn't up to me; the Bishop will have a say, and the church governing structure will have a say. Likewise, my lectureship at SMC might be extended, or it might be transformed into something else, and that something else may be more permanent (a tenure track job) or less permanent (back to adjunct work).
Last night at the end of the Maundy Thursday worship service, we stripped the altar. Almost everyone had a part to play, an item to carry out. It was much more participatory than anything I've experienced before. As I watched it happen, again I marveled at the circumstances that brought me to be in this position: the expectation of closed seminary housing which led me to reach out to Bishop Strickland about a possible internship site that could happen no matter where I was located, which led him to ask about the possibility of me being a SAM, which led me to decide to commit to moving back to my Lutheridge house and finishing my MDiv degree from a distance.
It's a strange place to be in, here for now, the future unknown. In so many ways, that's our situation much of the time, whether we realize it or not. I've gotten good at doing my best for the people where I am, where they are. Being a college teacher at a school that doesn't have degrees in my subject area (English) has trained me to know that we'll only be together for a short time and to be O.K. with that.
As we drove home last night, leaving Bristol as the last streaks of sun drained from the sky, I looked out across pastures and thought about all the different paths one can take in life, how much I am loving being a part-time minister at a small country church. If someone started out at a small country church and stayed there for their whole career, would that someone wonder about the roads not taken, perhaps yearning to have experienced being part of a ministry team with much larger resources?
Of course, we assume that if we're at a place with more resources, we'll be able to use them. I know that I've often been happiest in job settings with fewer resources which meant I was left alone to do my own thing. The same might be true of small congregations from the point of view of church members. In small churches, more people get to step up and do more--there's not a team of people who will do it, and we can't say, "Well, we pay the church workers to do these things, so I'm not going to."
And now we shift to Good Friday. Here's the close to my Good Friday sermon, a good grounding for the day: "For today, let us sit with Good Friday: the sadness, the horror, the wishing that our salvation did not have to look this way. Let us remember how much our societies want to break anyone who offers a different vision of a more just world. Let us stand in solidarity with those who are shattered by our societies. Let us trust in a God who gives us free will to make disastrous decisions, but who will also show us in spectacular ways that the forces of death and destruction will not have the final word."
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