JANUARY 2021
Dear MD friends,
Reading your year-end newsletters last month, I saw that many of you navigated the unusual year quite well. Some described very difficult times for yourselves, your neighbors, the people who stimulate your compassion. To summarize all I read from everyone into a short paragraph seems a great disservice to your setbacks and your innovations. May I put it this way: The people of God travel light, making quick adjustments to stay the course. That’s what I read in your letters throughout the year.
A friend here called 2020 the year of all Mondays. He might have something there. An author described it as when we discovered the loss of our cherished notions of how things ought to be.
So now we begin another year, not so brand new for a fair number of holdovers from the last. In time things will change; that’s what time produces. But as another friend put it, we won't head toward a new normal because the old normal wasn’t all that normal. There is no normal in this life, but plenty of abnormal.
With that as a given, how do we live? No matter our calling or our makeup, we are the people of the risen Christ. He leads, we follow.
Some of you told about extreme times of stretching you’ve not experienced before. May I toss this out: it just may be that our current world condition is God-sent in that it’s a time for his people to rest from past activities. A sort of sabbatical within the scatteredness. I would ask that while you continue to stay the course of obeying the call of the King, you also look for moments of rest in preparation for your next chapter of ministry.
Reading your year-end newsletters last month, I saw that many of you navigated the unusual year quite well. Some described very difficult times for yourselves, your neighbors, the people who stimulate your compassion. To summarize all I read from everyone into a short paragraph seems a great disservice to your setbacks and your innovations. May I put it this way: The people of God travel light, making quick adjustments to stay the course. That’s what I read in your letters throughout the year.
A friend here called 2020 the year of all Mondays. He might have something there. An author described it as when we discovered the loss of our cherished notions of how things ought to be.
So now we begin another year, not so brand new for a fair number of holdovers from the last. In time things will change; that’s what time produces. But as another friend put it, we won't head toward a new normal because the old normal wasn’t all that normal. There is no normal in this life, but plenty of abnormal.
With that as a given, how do we live? No matter our calling or our makeup, we are the people of the risen Christ. He leads, we follow.
Some of you told about extreme times of stretching you’ve not experienced before. May I toss this out: it just may be that our current world condition is God-sent in that it’s a time for his people to rest from past activities. A sort of sabbatical within the scatteredness. I would ask that while you continue to stay the course of obeying the call of the King, you also look for moments of rest in preparation for your next chapter of ministry.
No Comments