A GOOD COMBINATION

There are some things in life that are just made to go together. Hamburgers obviously need fries to be complete. Abbot needs Costello to make the comedy work. The Old Testament needs the New Testament for the Christian revelation to be fully understood. A blank page (or computer screen these days) needs meaningful words to become something valuable and inspiring. A good stew needs uglai to be perfect. (If you haven’t tried stew and ugali, trust me—or better yet visit East Africa and try it out).

Another combination that makes sense but which works out less often that a burger and fries is the combination of a pastor and a congregation. When the combination works, it is a beautiful thing. When it doesn’t work, it is a disaster not only for the church and the pastor but also for the wider Christian community because it shows our inability to actually follow the faith that we claim.

There are a variety of reasons why the combination doesn’t work. Sometimes, both congregations and pastors enter the relationship without God’s clear leading. That combination is going to fail simply because it results from people presuming to know as much or more than God. They either ignore the need to consult God on the potential combination or assume that what they want it what God wants.

While that is unfortunately a more common reality than most churches and pastors want to admit, I am going to ignore it in this post—I may deal with it sometime. Today, I want to look at why a combination put together by God goes wrong. Presumably, if God in his infinite wisdom brings together a pastor and a combination, it is literally a match made in heaven—so why would it fail?

Most of the time, the match fails because one side or the other or both forget something vital and important. They forget that God himself has selected this congregation and this pastor to be linked together for this point in time. God created the combination because at the point in time the pastor and congregation come together, it is the very best for both in the ever unfolding divine plan for the redemption of creation.

That may sound like a pretty big understanding of what is a very common reality—afterall, there are probably millions of churches around the world and therefore millions of pastor/congregation combinations. Do all of them have that same divine seal of approval making that particular combination a significant and vital part of God’s overall plan of redemption? Well, if both congregation and pastor ( and denominational leadership where applicable) have faithfully engaged in the process and have been fully open to the leading of the Spirit, then yes, their combination is a divinely planned connection that has a part to play in the overall process of moving a sin-scarred world towards its eventual rebirth.

And if that is true, then congregation and pastor need to work together to discover what God envisions them as being a good combination. The gifts, talents, needs and potentials of both pastor and congregation have been carefully and divinely considered and the combination brought together so that the congregation can continue to develop in faith, so that the pastor can continue to develop in faith and so that the overall momentum leading to the full redemption of creation can be maintained. When either the pastor or congregation—or both—forget the divine reality behind their being together, the whole thing gets out of whack.

Instead of seeing their combination as being for the betterment of both and the advancement of the kingdom, each side sees only what they want and seek to achieve it at the expense of the other—and also at the expense of putting yet another kink in the overall plan of redemption which God then has to work around.

Much better for both pastor and congregation to recognize the divine nature of their calling, to accept the need for mutual submission, to humbly seek the Spirit’s guidance as they seek to discover and express the reason for their coming together. When pastor and congregation mutually submit to each other and all submit to God, they are truly a good combination that will work even better than stew and ugali because stew and uglai will have a temporary effect while a good combination of pastor and congregation will have eternal effects.

May the peace of God be with you.

FRIDAY MORNING

Because of the nature of my work week, Friday is one of the days when I try to avoid doing any work. That is not always possible: funerals, wedding rehearsals, nursing home services and other bits and pieces of ministry end up getting scheduled for Fridays. But as much as I can, I plan on avoiding work on Fridays.

In many ways, Friday is the end of the work week for me. I see my work week as running from Saturday to the next Thursday. Saturday involves preparation (and nervousness) for Sunday. Sunday involves worship and then opens the door to the rest of the work week with its requirements for sermon preparation, Bible study preparation and attendance, pastoral visits and everything else that I need to cram into my two 40% pastoral positions.

So, when Thursday evening rolls around, I am ready for a break. Friday morning becomes a mini-vacation, a day to focus on my stuff, not work—provided, of course, it isn’t nursing home service Friday, there isn’t a funeral and no one has picked this weekend to get married. I rarely have glamorous plans for Friday.

Fridays off often involve running errands like grocery shopping and banking. It can involve mowing the lawn during the appropriate season. Sometimes, it will involve a date for a movie and supper—not often enough for that but that is the reality of our lives. Now and then, it involves getting at some repair or maintenance issue that I have put off all week because of lack of time and/or energy.

What is generally doesn’t involve is sleeping in. Somehow, it feels wrong to sleep in on Friday. I am a morning person and normally, church works gets to claim mornings as I wrestle with sermons and Bible studies and how to get all the required information in the Sunday bulletin without having to produce an insert as well. And that is fine with me—working for the church is not just my job, it is also my calling and I need to give both God and the church my best, including the time of the day when I am at my best.

But Friday mornings—well, I have the sermons and the bulletin and the Bible study done. There isn’t a meeting, a nursing home service, a funeral or wedding rehearsal on the schedule. I can wake up at my regular time and know that when I sit in my chair with my breakfast granola and banana, it is my time. I can write a blog post, stare out the window, read a book, play solitaire—anything is possible and nothing is essential. For a couple of hours on Friday morning, my time belongs to me.

I am an moderately strong introvert and times like this are important to my overall mental, physical and spiritual health. Since my work keeps me connected with people, I need these spaces where there are no people. Ministry is people intensive—even when I am not physically with people, they are present. I write sermons with church people in mind. I think and pray about church people when I am reading for work. I am aware that for most people, I am just a phone call away.

But on Friday mornings, I am not working. The phone is in the bedroom, far enough away that I can pretend not to hear it, especially since my hearing aids are there as well. Any writing I do is for me—I know that people read my blogs, something for which I am deeply grateful but I don’t have the same level of connection with blog readers that I have with the church people I work for and with all day. Writing a blog is something for me—and the fact that others read it is icing on the cake.

So, Friday mornings are mine. The first couple of hours is my time, time that I need to feed and nurture me. And so I take it, I enjoy it, I grow because of it. The benefits of early Friday morning more than make up for the fact that I don’t sleep in after a busy week. Thank God for Friday mornings.

May the peace of God be with you.

MORE LIFE

I am going to be a preacher in this post. When we preachers tell stories in our sermons, we have to be careful. We want people to be able to identify with the story but we don’t want anyone to identify the actual persons or events in the story so we engage in a lot of conflation, obfuscation and editing of the story. I don’t want to say that we lie or make up stories because that would be unpreacherly. We do, however, take more than a few liberties to protect the innocent and the not so innocent.

So, with that in mind, let me tell you about my friend—a person whom I have never really met but who borrows bits and pieces from lots of people I have met, read about or listened to gossip about. My friend suffers from some learning disabilities, which made school a difficult process. She (or he) was also abused in a variety of ways by a variety of people: neglected by parents, beaten by siblings, sexually abused by family and strangers. They ended up in the child welfare system, where sometimes they had good homes and sometimes had the homes all TV shows love to show.

Along the way, it was discovered that they had some major chronic and incurable health problems which were sort of controlled by medication but which created some major limits physically and emotionally and financially.

I could go on but why bother—the point of the story is that my imaginary friend has the deck seriously stacked against them. Actually, let’s add the fact that they were born in a poor rural community in a country where poverty is endemic and the government so corrupt that the poverty is institutionalized.

When faced with a life with as many difficulties and drawbacks and roadblocks as this, most people choose to live. Suicide is always an option and while suicide rates are high, they are not as high as they might be. No matter how difficult the life situation, most people choose to live for as long and as well as they can. They will fight to live. They may steal to get food, seek counselling to deal with their demons, beg to get medicine, illegally cross borders to get safety, start a charity to benefit themselves and others, find a tutor to explain the realities of math, fall prey to a scam artist or cult leader promising something, join a church, get community support for a power wheelchair—but they will keep going, seeking to live as best as they can given the realities of life.

And the truth is that most of us do that. We are somehow designed to choose life, no matter what. Certainly, there are some for whom the prospect of continued life is too much and they choose not life—but given number of people and the number of issues, limits and problems all of us face, the deep and powerful reality is that the majority of people choose to live. We almost always manage to find some hope that keeps us going.

Right now, I sit here writing this suffering with serious arthritic pain resulting from mowing the lawn and the dampness from the coming rain. But I am writing, not sitting moaning and groaning, although I do some of that at times. But like most of the rest of the world, I am going to keep going: writing, working, watching TV, walking (or limping), preaching sermons and helping others as they also keep going.

We are designed to live, to thrive and grow. We find hope in the most hopeless of situations. While we might not thrive in someone else’s life, we all work at coping with our own life. That seems to be a part of our God-given nature—we are hard wired to live and seek the best life we can, which means that we will life with, around and through almost anything. Those who find it too much are few and far between and we need to view them with compassion rather than judgement. But for most of us, we are going to keep going, no matter what.

This drive to live is, I think, one of God’s blessings. Our human sin makes life hard and difficult—but our divinely given drive to live keeps us going.

May the peace of God be with you.

BUSINESS MEETINGS

I don’t like meetings. There are a few that have been tolerable, many that have actually been important and a whole lot that could have been shorter, tighter and more effective. Generally, given an even choice between attending a meeting or going to the dentist, I would pick the dentist, except for the fact that going to the dentist is a lot like going to a meeting.

I don’t dispute the need for meetings. They are important and significant and are a necessary part of church and denominational and even normal life. I am not an anarchist, a dictator or a megalomaniac. Getting people together to talk about stuff is often the only way we can discover God’s leading and figure out how he wants us to do the work he has called us to do. Over the years, I have become very good at enabling meetings to become places where people have the freedom and encouragement to share and grow and develop ministry. I have also tied to teach other church leaders how to make meeting more effective and more a part of the process of discerning God’s leading.

But for all that, I don’t actually like meetings. So, when a new year rolls around, I brace myself for the wave of annual meetings I have to deal with—these days, that means anywhere up to a dozen different meetings by the time I count finance meetings, deacons’ meetings, congregational meetings and pastorate meetings. Sometimes, I am the chair of the meeting and other times, someone else chairs the meeting (I prefer someone else to be the chair).

Typically, church business meetings have been somewhat restricted to church members but because of the nature of our churches, we have been having open meetings and specifically inviting our non-members to be part of the process. I jokingly tell them during the announcement of the meeting that they are really a part of our fellowship and if we members have to endure the business meeting, they should have to as well.

One pastorate just wrapped up our season of annual meetings. And in spite of my antipathy to meetings, I felt that all the meetings in the process had a positive flavour. We did more than look at financial statements and hear reports. We spent time together, sharing about family and friends, passing on information about absent people, joking about who did what when. We were comforted by the fact that we didn’t go into debt over the past year and that we actually did some good stuff over the past year.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses—we talked about those who had died or had to move in the past year. We wondered how our aging creaky membership could look after our aging creaky buildings—none of us is able anymore to grab a hammer and fix the rotting sills that make the floor sag around the front door. But there are ways to deal with that, especially since we do have some money in the bank.

As pastor, I had some good things to report. Our churches grew over the year—not so much in numbers but definitely in faith. We have a sense of confidence in our churches. We have a developing understanding of how we are being salt and light in our communities; we are seeing some positive response from the community to the ministry we are doing; we have encouraged and enabled people to try a variety of things; we have experimented with worship and mission; we have shared life and all its triumphs and crises with prayer and support and casseroles. We have been the church.

So, I still hate meetings. But this meeting cycle has been worthwhile because it allowed us to take a look at ourselves and see where God has been working, what he has been doing and how he is leading us into the future. We have a bit of money, enough for our needs. Our buildings need some work but we can handle it. We have grown in a lot of ways—and we can all see it. We might have seen all that stuff without the meetings but then again, without the meetings, we wouldn’t have had the chance to get it all together at the same time. I won’t actually say “Thank God for meetings” but I will thank him for what he has shown us through the meetings.

May the peace of God be with you.

DURING THE HYMN…

As our church’s regular worship leader, I am normally quite busy during the singing of the hymns. I am checking to make sure that I have the next hymn marked, looking over the congregation to see if I missed anyone’s absence, making sure I have the right spot in the order of service set up on the tablet and, more and more these days with my aging tablet, making sure that I have enough battery power left to finish the service. Needless to say, I am not generally paying a lot of attention to the hymn.

But during a recent service, one line caught my attention. The organist had picked “Onward Christian Soldiers” as the opening hymn—and did her usual excellent job of playing the hymn—I almost felt I needed to march around the sanctuary during the chorus. What caught my attention, though, was the first line of the third verse, where we sang, “Like a mighty army moves the church of God”.

As we sang those words, I was struck by a sense of something—irony, delusion, confusion—something. Here we were, the seventeen of us who made up the congregation that day singing words that compared us to a mighty army. Now, it is true that our numbers were down that day for a variety of reasons: some were travelling, some were at another community function, some were sick and some were just AWOL. But even at our best, we are not a mighty army—mostly, the best our congregations can come with is a seriously under strength platoon and that depends heavily on visitors and summer people.

And our under strength platoon disresembles an army in many other ways. The two deacons who take up the offering are both in their 80s—they are doing really well for their age but they are still in their 80s. The pastor (me) isn’t capable of marching too far—I limp to the door to greet people after being on my feet for the worship service.

And so, our under strength, aging platoon creakily gets to our feet and songs words that proclaim us to be a mighty army. Maybe I should have checked the tablet battery one more time instead of paying attention to the words of the hymn. But then again, maybe the Spirit meant me to focus on those words.

Our church isn’t an army by any stretch of preacherly exaggeration. We were probably closer to that years ago when worship attendance could reach company strength but even at our best, we were never a mighty army. These days, we mostly wonder if we will have enough people to sing the hymns let alone do mighty army acts, whatever they are.

But we are a church—and we are part of the Church Universal, that body of believers stretching through time and space to encompass all people who have discovered the grace of God through Jesus Christ. We might be a small part of that Church Universal but we are still a part of it. And because we are a part of the whole church, the success, triumphs and victories of the church belong to us as well, just as our triumphs past, present and future belong to the whole church.

Our under strength platoon might not be triumphing like the booming church army in Kenya, for example. We might be losing members rather than gain members faster than we can count. We might not be standing up to persecution and government corruption and discrimination. We might not know how long we will keep our doors open, especially if we don’t figure out how to fix the sagging floor in the sanctuary.

But we are touching lives. We helped several families through the pain of death. We are growing in our personal faith through our Bible study group. We are helping the local school provide care for disadvantaged students. We can and do provide prayer support for anyone and everyone who asks for it and for many who don’t ask for it. We support church efforts here, there and everywhere through our offerings and prayers.

So maybe our under strength, seriously aged platoon isn’t a mighty army. But we are still part of a mighty army; we still belong to the victorious side; we have a place and a mission and we are doing it as best we can, with the Holy Spirit’s empowering.

May the peace of God be with you.

A RAINY DAY

As I write this, we are experiencing what some might consider a typical Nova Scotia April day: it is raining, the wind is blowing. It is dark, dreary and feels cold and damp even with the heat turned on. The gloomy day is made gloomier because April in Nova Scotia is a real in-between month. We have no snow, which deeply pleases most people. But the trees are still barren sticks, lawns are a brown mess of dead grass, left over leaves and fallen branches. A rainy April day in Nova Scotia is filled with nothing—everything worthwhile is either gone (cross country skiing, winter trips to warm places, the TV series) or yet to come (green grass, leaves, sunshine, summer vacation).

So what, I wonder, do I do on a rainy day in April? Well, to start with, I am not going to get depressed. Even if this rainy day is the first of four or five rainy days we have been told to expect, the gloom isn’t going to push me into depression. I tend not to react to the weather that way—I get depressed for other reasons, which have to do with my reaction to life events, not the weather.

Nor am I going to get frustrated about the things I can’t do because of the rain gloom of April. I don’t much like mowing lawns to start with and so looking out on an expanse of brown, drippy grass is somewhat satisfying to me—I don’t have to mow it. True, I could be out raking the leftover leaves and picking up branches but I don’t like that even on sunny days so not being able to do it now is also somewhat gratifying.

Just to make things a little more complex, I actually enjoy a nice rainy day. I like being able to look up from the keyboard and watch the rain through the drop spattered window. I am sure some of that come from our time in Kenya where rain is seen as a blessing. But even without that, there is something relaxing to me about watching the rain. I don’t get the full impact these days because we live in a well insulated house so I can’t actually hear the rain—but I will make that sacrifice to feel warm as I watch the silent rain. I may not be as enamoured with the rain at the end of this four or five day rainy season but for now, I can type, look out the window and enjoy the rain.

It isn’t like the rain is going to actually change any of my plans. We don’t live in a flood plain and the roads I need to travel today are all well above the highest water marks. The house has a newly shingled roof so it won’t leak—and if by some chance it does leak, the roofers have to come back to fix it under their warranty terms. Between my house, the car, my rain gear and the places where I go, I am not going to get particularly wet no matter how far I go. And, by the way, I kind of like driving on rainy days as well.

Rainy days do upset my wife’s dog—he doesn’t actually like getting wet and so avoids going out as long as he can. When I am in charge of the door, that is an added benefit for me—the dog doesn’t keep coming to me to go out and then have to be let back in all that much.

So, in the end, I am going to enjoy the day. I am warm and comfortable. I don’t have to get up for the dog a dozen times. I have stuff to do and places to go. So, let it rain. The dog might be less content than he would be on a sunny day but I am comfortable, not depressed and have lots of stuff to do. Eventually, the rain will stop, the grass will grow, the leaves will come out and the sun will shine. I will enjoy all those blessings—well, maybe not the grass growing once I have to start mowing but I will enjoy most of those blessings.

But for today, I will enjoy the blessings of a cold, windy, rainy day in April in Nova Scotia.

May the peace of God be with you.

SOMETIMES I WONDER…

I am a pastor of small congregations. That has been the basic description of what I do pretty much for the whole of my ministry career. I like to jazz it up a bit by including the fact that I have also taught at our denominational seminary, spent some time as a chaplain at a younger offenders facility and even been a missionary in Kenya. But the truth is that all these have been a minor part of my career—most of the time, I have been the pastor of small, often struggling congregations.

I was once pastor of a congregation that had a membership of 200+, which sounds really great but before I arrived, the actual attendance had shrunk to perhaps 25. A sanctuary that will seat 250 or more people looks pretty depressing with 25 in attendance, to say nothing about the heavy financial burden it places on the congregation.

The decision to be a pastor of small congregations isn’t one that I consciously made at some point but it is one that I had a part in. There were times along the way when some larger congregations were interested in calling me as pastor but each time, my sense was that God wasn’t leading me in that direction—there was more I was supposed to accomplish where I was at the time.

It would be nice to report that every small congregation that I served as a pastor eventually grew into a large, thriving congregation. There was growth in all of them—we generally had baptismal services each year and people transferred their membership in and new people started attending. But most times, at the end of my ministry, the attendance numbers weren’t all that different from the numbers at the beginning of my ministry. The actual people were often different but the numbers were pretty much the same. People died, moved away, got sick—all of which meant that the congregations grew at pretty much the same rate they shrank.

Given that I am already over the “official” retirement age, I don’t actually foresee much chance that I will ever be the pastor of a large congregation, which is okay with me because my limited experience with them suggests that I don’t feel all that comfortable in large congregations as a worshipper, let alone as a pastor.

So recently, one of my personal questions has focused on the overall value of what I have been doing for the past 40+ years. I wonder if being the pastor of a handful of small congregations has been a worthwhile way to invest my energy and time and professional effort. I think I have two answers.

The first is theological and sounds somewhat sanctimonious. It has obviously been worthwhile because I was doing what God wanted me to do where he wanted me to do it. I know that sounds a bit too pietistic but I do believe that and there are days when that I find that a very significant part of my understanding of myself and my career.

The second is more practical. What I have done has been worthwhile because of the people I have worked with over the years, the relationships that have developed, the faiths that have been strengthened. Working with small congregations gives me the luxury of time to actually work with people in some very significant ways.

I have had time to help people discover and develop their spiritual gifts. I have had time to help people work through their deep spiritual fears and questions. I have had time to counsel the hurting; encourage the searching; enable the struggling. I have been able to help people find answers to hard questions. And along the way, I have been able to laugh a lot with them, cry almost as much, drink a lot of coffee, eat a lot of great food.

And in the process, we have all grown. We have grown in our understanding of the Gospel and we have especially grown in our understanding and practice of Christian community. As we worship, study, eat, share, pray, work and do whatever we do in our small congregations, we experience the wonder of God at work in our midst.

And so while I sometimes wonder if I have followed the best course, most of the time, I don’t—I more often give God thanks for the opportunity to serve small congregations.

May the peace of God be with you

WHAT IF WE GOT BIGGER?

Our small congregation was worshipping. We were a bit smaller than normal but it wasn’t a problem—we knew where everyone was and they were all healthy and safe. Our worship proceeded at its normal pace: some scheduled stuff and lots of unscheduled interruptions and questions. Our worship resembles a worship service wrapped in a Bible study packaged in a theological seminary, trimmed with laughter and sprinkled with lots of questions and insights.

We share, we sing, we read and discuss Scripture, we pray, we have a sort of a sermon—we worship and it is a worship that we all find satisfying and uplifting. And since we have been shut down for three months, we are just getting back into the process, everyone enjoying the opportunity to get back to something we deeply enjoy.

As we were winding up, one of the participants raised another question. She wondered what would happen if we got bigger. Would we be able to do the same sort of worship? Her speculation was that we might be able to be the same up to a certain point but after that, there would just be too many people to do what we do. We joked a bit about that but for her, it was a real concern, not a major concern and certainly not one that will drive her to refuse entry to new people but a concern nonetheless.

I don’t expect our doors will be broken down by hoards of people wanting to be a part of our worship in the near future but since then I have been thinking some about the church in general and in specific. We have something unique and special in this congregation, something that works in part because of our small numbers. It is also possible because we are a group of people who share faith, a concern for understanding our faith, an appreciation for each other and a variety of other things.

For us, the church becomes a place where people can worship in the context of a free-flowing, unstructured structure that allows everyone freedom to participate. It works for us. But if we change the mix of people, it might not work as well, although our experience with visitors over the years is that they tend to find what we offer interesting. It will also change if we get a lot more people—the time factor will come into play. When half our group of 8-10 have a question or comment, we have time for that. But if we had 50 people and half of them had equally interesting questions or insights, there simply wouldn’t be time for what we do now.

I personally am not going to lie awake at night wondering what we are going to do about this. The church—both our little church and the church as a whole—isn’t static, or at least is shouldn’t be static. The Holy Spirit enables the church to be what it needs to be at any given time and place. Or rather, it is better to say the Holy Spirit seeks to enable the church to be what it needs to be at any given time and place.

But time and place and people change and the church needs to change as well. What we do now works well for us. Our church is stronger and more grounded because of our unique approach to worship (and Bible study as well). It has given us an opportunity to explore our faith and develop new understandings and ideas. All of us are stronger in our faith because of the way the Spirit has been working in our midst.

But neither the church nor the Spirit is static. The question we need to deal with isn’t “What if we change?” but “Where is the Spirit leading us?”. Change is inevitable. Our response as believers is not to try and convince ourselves and the Spirit that what happened yesterday is the only way the Spirit can lead but rather to use the Spirit’s presence to find the courage to embrace the change the Spirit is bringing to us so that we can continue to serve God and do his will.

Fortunately, I think that all of us in our small worshipping group have the willingness to recognize that things change—and hopefully, because of the way the Spirit has been working in our midst, we will have the faith and courage to accept His change.

May the peace of God be with you.

BEING A PARENT

One of my granddaughters got a bit upset with me during our recent visit. We were reading a book snuggled together on the couch or engaged in some equally grandparently activity when I called her my baby girl. She indignantly told me that she was five and wasn’t a baby—she was a big girl. That sparked a short discussion of parenting (and grandparenting) that sort of satisfied her and allowed me to continue sitting with her.

I told her that her aunt, whom she likes but is older than her father is still my baby girl because children—and grandchildren—will always be baby girls (and baby boys) to their parents and grandparents. I wasn’t joking or trying to cover a mistake. Parents and grandparents have a hard time letting children grown up.

On the whole, I think I have done a pretty good job of letting my kids grow up. I have always encouraged them to think for themselves; to make their own decisions; to take responsibility for themselves. I have rejoiced at their successes; grieved with them over their failures; supported even their questionable decisions. I enjoy having an adult coffee time with my kids much more than I enjoyed reading Dr. Seuss to them.

But they are still my kids—and grandkids. I will always have a part of me that feels that I have to look after them and be concerned with their welfare and future and wellbeing. I don’t express that parental reality by trying to run their lives. I am not an overzealous parent who thinks my kids and grandkids need my advice and guidance and control in every aspect of their lives. If asked, I might give an opinion but I am much more comfortable listening to them as they talk out some decision or another without my specific input. I work hard at respecting their independence and freedom and seeing them as mature adults and maturing grandchildren. I work hard at giving them the respect and relationship their situation requires: reading books with the pre-schoolers; pushing the swing for the toddlers; enduring the emotional swings of the second grader; listening to the child turned parent as they deal with some issue or another.

But in the end, they are still my children and grandchildren. I have relationships and responsibilities with them that I have with no others. I am a pastor and counsellor and have a great many relationships where I am involved in helping people. But as significant as those relationships are, they can never be the same as the one I have with my children and by extension with their children. My wife and I have been involved in their lives from the moment of their conception and the relationship is a basic part of our whole being.

Our sons and daughter are fully grown, mature adults all of whom have become responsible and capable human beings. They are caring and helpful and are all making a positive contribution to society. They are in stable, healthy relationships and live good lives. But they are still and will still be my babies as long as I am alive.

The fact that my baby boys tower over me and my baby girl is highly respected in her profession doesn’t change the fact that they are still my babies. The fact that I am proud of the adults they have become and marvel at their abilities and sensibilities doesn’t alter the reality that they are still my little ones. The fact that all of them are providing significant care and support for others doesn’t alter the fact that I am and always will be their (very proud) father.

So, when I sit snuggled on the couch reading a book with a five year old or in a coffee shop talking life with a 30 something or follow a 40 something around her work, I am honoured and happy to be the parent and grandparent of my baby girls and baby boys. Some are definitely well past the official baby stage—but as any parent or grandparent knows, that is only a chronological thing. Baby boys and girls are still baby boys and girls no matter what their age or stage.

May the peace of God be with you.

BEING DIFFERENT

The other day at one of the Bible studies I pretend to lead, we touched on the topic of DNA. I happened to mention that DNA is one of the signs of God’s love and grace. He loves us enough to create us with a foolproof way to ensure that we will each one be different. Because of the seemingly infinite number of possible combinations of DNA, the chances of two people being born exactly the same are for all intents and purposes impossible, except of course for identical twins.

But a variety of studies have also shown that identical twins, who are born with the same DNA, eventually end up showing some differences. They might have the same DNA but the actual process of living causes them to diverge. One might catch an illness that the other manages to avoid; one might have an accident that changes them; one might have some trauma that the other doesn’t. Whatever the reason, although their DNA might produce nearly identical individuals, the effects of their environment are going to individualize them.

So why, given that God can and does do what he wants by definition, does he create living things including humans, based on a pretty much foolproof mechanism for ensuring diversity? That seems counter-intuitive, especially for people living in the machine/tech age that we live in. We pretty much assume things will be the same.

If I see someone with the same make and model of computer as I have, I can be pretty sure that unless they have more tech knowledge or money than I have, the computer they are working on is exactly the same as mine: same tech inside, same specs on paper; same colour; same performance. Some differences might develop—their computer may not get dropped as much as mine and I don’t spill as much wine on mine as they do on theirs. But ignoring outside influences like that, we have the same computer.

Large segments of humanity seem to prefer things be the same. Many organizations from the military to coffee shop chains require their members to dress identically. Some require the same hairstyle, the same way of talking, the same beliefs. Even the church isn’t immune from this drive to sameness. Many church groups require its members to believe the same doctrines with the same fervor, based on the same interpretation of the same translation of the Scriptures by the same gurus. Divergence, whether in military uniforms, coffee preparation processes or doctrinal stances are suspect and dangerous.

And yet, God has created us in a way that requires is to be different. In the Bible study that sparked this post, two of us are left handed. One of us is colour blind. Two prefer the KJV. One loves to bake cookies for the group. All of us love eating the cookies. Some are quite conservative in their theology. Others are willing to look at less conservative understandings. We have no real uniformity except for the fact that we all show up at the same place week after week to share and discuss and discover what God is trying to say to us.

And the most significant reason for our ability to do this is that we have learned to celebrate our diversity and use that God given diversity as one of the vital foundation stones of our study process. As we talk and share and discuss and question, we give each other glimpses of what God is showing us. The more we talk and share and discuss and question, the closer we come to understanding what God wants us to see. And we have discovered that one of the prime messages that God gives to us is that diversity is one of his gifts to humanity, a gift that we need to accept and celebrate.

We don’t all need to be left handed. We don’t all need to be colour blind. Some of us can prefer the KJV. Some of us can be Baptist and some Catholic. Some of us can have grey hair and some can have blue hair. Our diversity is important and valuable and points us to a basic theological truth: God loves our diversity. He must, since it was and is part of his plan that it is pretty much impossible for us to be the same.

May the peace of God be with you.