New Year Resolutions
As the New Year rolls around, it is a time when some of us ponder changes we would like to make in our lives or the life of the church. Other people seem to think that everything is fine and they don't need to change. In fact, what they love about their church is that it is the one thing in their life that doesn't change when everything else is changing so rapidly they can't keep up.
This creates an interesting dilemma: If we live in a world that is rapidly changing and we don't want to change, then we need to ask: " What are we going to do differently so we can stay the same?"
To answer this dilemma we need to discern the life-giving or eternal quality within what we value and don't want to change. If we hold the life-giving quality, or more importantly, let the life-giving quality hold us, when we can allow the temporal way we experience that value to change without distress.
The alternative is to cling to the temporal vehicle for the life-giving quality and feel afraid and distressed whenever the temporal world changes. This is the essence of idolatry, clinging to the temporal vehicle of an eternal quality.
Hope is the ability to imagine a preferred future and have the confidence that we can achieve that future. When we imagine the timeless life-giving qualities in our future, then we will have hope.
Since we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future, we need to ensure we are working on creating our preferred future that contains what is life-giving. If we don't, we will simply be the victim of another person's future, which may or may not contain what we value.
Here at Epworth we have spent considerable time over the past year discovering what it is we truly value and what gives us life. It was out of this discovery time of listening and sharing as a community we discovered our God-given purpose, which is to "Create Caring Communities."
As we continue in the new year to live into our preferred future together and fulfill out God-given purpose as a community, we may see some changes in what we do and how we do it here at Epworth, but at the core will always be our desire to be for each other and others a church that "Creates Caring Communities."
May we all have a blessed New Year and be a blessing to others as well.
Re. Dr. Timothy Duchesne
|
