Having Patience...
/As I only got my preliminary blog out last week, I decided to hold off until now to give you some breathing space!
As you can see, the date of my first blog is September 1st. I was so excited to start off this month with a newly designed website to replace the old clunker I had. I was going to make a splash and jump headlong into this renewed ministry!
And then…there was learning a whole new website design system which was not as intuitive as I thought it would be, and something called DNS settings and “pointing” my old website to this one, and outsourced help staff from my old web host trying to answer my questions in the middle of the night my time in broken English. So here I am, on September 22nd, with the web page finally fully connected only yesterday. Sigh.
As I think about it, this can be so typical of ministry itself. Leaders are so excited to begin the new season or kick off a new ministry with a splash (or feel we should be). We can have an urgency to get things moving, to capitalize on timing and energy and to want to make a big difference as quickly as possible. Anxiety about survival and numbers and passing on the faith to children in a post-Christian culture can threaten to overwhelm us. Our intentions are good. Our desire to nurture and catch the window of time when we think people are most receptive is meant to build the Kingdom.
And then it can take weeks for families to return from the summer, volunteers can already seem tired or resentful instead of having used their "time off" to recharge and be excited as we had hoped, and there can be a general malaise and concern about where we are going and what our priorities should be. Programs begin and excuses can come in about why someone isn’t helping or participating this year – “we thought we’d give hockey (or guitar or soccer or art classes) a try”. And that first burst of energy can start to slip away.
The problem is that we have fallen into the trap of the speed of the surrounding culture and the idea that it is us who do all these things. Instead, we need to rest in God’s timing and trust in God’s faithfulness and presence to bring about changes in people’s lives in the right season. It doesn’t mean that we don’t offer things - we are still called to nurture and grow faith in community – but we need to do this with profound trust in God to provide, to make connections happen at just the right time, to surprise us with making the Kingdom present in ways we never would have imagined. We need to look and listen and discern where God is leading.
Our challenge is to offer up all that we are doing to God’s awesome touch and power. We need to unplug our own expectations and schedule of when we assume people will respond and how, and just allow for the movement of the Spirit. And this can be profound and difficult and much more work than having control of planning and outcomes. The question isn’t how many are coming, but how is God present to those who do come? How do we offer hospitality and care for the needs of those sent to us?
Here’s to developing the gift of patience, of learning to trust in God’s perfect timing and to being willing to relinquish our plans if need be to make way for the plans of God.