Breaking Old Cycles

I'm now in the St. Louis, Missouri area, becoming increasingly nervous and excited as I await the event of this evening. In a few hours I will make my way downtown to see the University of Missouri Tigers open the 2008 football season against the strong and vastly improved University of Illinois Fighting Illini. The pressure is always on the favored team, which is Missouri, especially when the other team wants to even the score from last year's match-up.

Regardless of the outcome of the game, this day I feel a sense of hopefulness from an odd source. We're in an election year in this nation. I'm a fiercely defiant independent voter. I feel that neither party hits the mark in addressing the needs of this nation and the world. However, the landscape of this year's presidential election is pretty impacting. History will be made, regardless of the outcome. Our country could have its first non-Caucasian president. We could have the first president from among the combatants in the Vietnam conflict. And, as of yesterday, we could have our first female vice-president. As I awoke this morning it occurred to me that it really wasn't that long ago that African-Americans and women could not vote, much less run for political office. And it definitely was not that long ago that the nation was trying hard to ignore and forget the dark cloud of the Vietnam era and those who served bravely within it.

Some say that life is cyclic, and nothing really changes. Different players, same script and stage...I hear this presumption a lot as I listen to pastors and leaders from various established Christian congregations. The same people always hold power in churches, they say. The same established procedures shoot down any needed changes. Congregations stay more focused on themselves than on those outside their walls. What goes around, comes around, and nothing changes.

I don't believe that. Seemingly insurmountable barriers do fall. New ground is plowed. Sometimes we who are Jesus-followers forget that we serve a God who makes all things new. During the persecution of Christians in the first century, God reminded a follower of Jesus named John that the same old powers of spirit-crushing, destroying, and death-dealing would not keep running their destructive cycles. God unveiled before John a vision of a new heaven and a new earth.

I'm not saying that this year's election with bring about the Kingdom of God...far from it. The best of human effort does not bring about that which comes from the hand of God alone. Still, it's symbolic of the fact that things do change. We're not bound by the same categories and constraints forever and ever. This is especially true under the Lordship of Jesus the Christ.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

Completing What Has Begin In You

I've spent the last eleven Wednesday evenings with a real dynamic and faith-seeking group of people from our local congregation. They've been examining what it means to encounter and experience a God who is living, who is at work all around us, and who is pursuing a personal relationship with each one of us. It's been a powerful joy to watch them journey together. I was looking for a way to express my thanks to God and my appreciation to them. I ended up using Eugene Peterson's expression of Philippians 1:3-6 from his paraphrase, The Message: "Every time you cross my mind I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God's Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears." (italics mine.)

The last line is the one that really caught my attention tonight. If you are reading this blog and you feel discouraged in your faith journey, these words are for you. Maybe you sense no direction and no fire in your walk with Christ right now. Maybe you're been hurt in your journey, and maybe it's been fellow believers who have been the vehicle of the wound. Perhaps others seem to "get it" in a way you feel you never have. It could be that you wonder if this whole following-Jesus-thing is worth it at all.

Know this - the very fact that you even face these struggles indicates that God has stirred something in you. God will not abandoned what God has started in His love for you. God will bring to completion what God has started in you. Don't give up. If you need help on this journey, reach out and get it. Find a Jesus follower who will walk along with you for a time. If I can help in that search, let me know. (gwp@sikestonfirstumc.org.)

Let's group up and float around this next bend together.