Resurrection: Be the Evidence
Eastertide beckons us to contemplate the meaning of Jesus' resurrection and ours. Jim Friedrich, an Episcopal priest writes of it, "Don't explain it....The central question of Easter is not 'What happened to Jesus way back then?' but rather 'Where is Jesus now--for us?' ...The resurrection, although breaking into history on a specific temporal occasion, is not the property of the past. As God's future showing itself in our present, it belongs to all times and seasons. Jesus is alive, still showing up as a transfiguring presence in a world fraught with absences. Jesus is not over, and his story is not over. It will only be completed in the divinization of the cosmos, when God is in all and all are in God. Easter isn't something we remember. It's something we live and breathe. Resurrection has consequences. The resurrection is more than an idea we talk about or believe propositionally. It's something we become, something we 'prove' in the living of our stories." ("Don't Explain It" Christian Century, April 10, 2019, p. 10-11)
The first Apostles got in trouble with the authorities for rocking the status quo. Taken before the council a second time after being given strict instructions by the high priest NOT to speak of a risen Jesus in public again, Peter and the other Apostles answered, "We are witnesses to these things." (Acts 5:27-32).
This blog post is this 21st Century Christian's witness to the risen living Jesus recognized in life's heartbreaking little deaths of transitions, the lost wandering, and invigorating new life that follows. This is my witness.
Raised in a Christian family, my mother's mantra which she repeated again and again as she told her story, our family's stories, "The Lord has walked with me." She told how she and her brother were playing alone in their parent's bedroom when she was nine, and Uncle Sammy was six years old. She was playing with a doll on her parent's bed. Uncle Sammy had found a handgun in my grandfather's bureau drawer and was exploring it, when all of a sudden "pow" it went off! A bullet hit her in the chest. It missed every major organ. After her recovery her Sunday School teacher commented, "The Lord must have been riding on that bullet." My mom died of dementia at the age of 87. Among her very few possessions with her in the Memory Care Unit, which she had held onto through all the moves to the many homes where she lived throughout her life, was that bullet wrapped in tissue, and the bundle of letters written to her by her third grade classmates. She recognized the presence of the risen Lord, not in the tragedy, but in her survival of this and subsequent trials: a first born with kidney failure, the stillbirth of her fourth child, welcoming a gay brother-in-law to live with the family in 1950's. A blessing, he fed and changed the diapers of my one year old sister during that difficult pregnancy. "The Lord has walked with me."
Hard difficult things happen in our lives that bring an end to some things, and open the way to the new. As my mother looked back on her life and now as I ponder my life, it is amazing how our richest blessings hers and mine have come following our most trying experiences, allowing us to say, "The Lord has walked with me. We are witnesses to these things."
My dad had type I diabetes and was pretty frail throughout my teenage years. My mom and I were constantly on alert to his blood sugar level. She at church meetings constantly pondering how do I get to him if he goes into shock. Me, I was on duty while hunting with him in the mountains. When walking the glen trail at Rickett's Glenn State Park, he went into shock when we were miles from help. My mom took him by the belt and muscled him up those rock steps. We got some honey in him and he was fine. We were exhausted for days. The Lord has walked with me.
I was in music class in the band room the spring of my junior year in high school, when Mr. Baker, the principal stepped in and summoned me to teacher's office. He said, "Your dad has had a heart attack. His heart arrested, but because he was already in the hospital, they were able to revive him." When I finally got to the hospital I learned that he had some broken ribs, from their pounding on him. He lived, returned to work, but retired on disability the next January at the age of 52, my senior year. My parents didn't know what to do. We had to move out of the church manse once daddy retired. Where to go? They had little savings. My brothers just completed college and seminary, my sister was in college. I was still in high school. My parents and I had just visited ministry friends the summer before. They lived in an apartment in a turn of the century banker's mansion set up at the time of their death as an estate for retired ministers who had served that Presbytery. There were three apartments. One was unoccupied upstairs. These friends suggested my parents call the man who oversaw the estate. His name was Lee Brown. Mom called explaining our predicament. The first words out of his mouth were "I don't think that will be a problem." Did I mention the apartment was rent free? The Lord has walked with me.
My parents moved in early March. I stayed in the community until I graduated from high school. I lived on a farm with Clair and Mid Hammond, good church friends and my Senior High Sunday School teacher. Getting into the car after my high school commencement was one of the hardest moments of my life. While my classmates went off to parties, I left everything I knew and drove two hours to join my parents in a place where I knew no one. It was a stark contrast after a senior year of shining like a star in that small rural school. I felt lost and alone.
Except I had visited my parents on Mother's Day weekend, and went to church with them. I summoned the courage to attend the young adult Sunday School class in the pastor's study. I was the youngest in the room. One of the girls was nine months pregnant and due any day. That took up most of the oxygen in the room. When in walked a girl with long brown hair, wearing a white dress with a small flower print. She lit up the room with her smile. I would later learn that she was a cousin to everyone in the room except me, and the daughter of Lee Brown! She was all I could think about on the drive back to the Valley. Did I mention this church is in Paradise, PA right across the highway from Christ's Home for Children?
So I moved into a hot unfinished room in the third floor attic of that old mansion. I got a job pumping gas at a station just down the road, close enough that I rode my bike to work. I ran that gas station pumping gas, selling cigarettes, all summer alone, by myself. Except, that girl I noticed at church called me on the phone and invited me to a Bible Study group with her friends. She knew who I was because of her father. The rest is history. We had our first date that August. The next August we became a committed couple. The next August she said "Yes" when I asked her to marry me. The next August we were married. The next August we returned from orientation as newly commissioned Presbyterian missionaries headed for Brazil. This April 30th, next week she will retire after forty two years as a missionary, mission interpreter, pastor's spouse, Director of Christian Education, CROP Walk Coordinator, Connections Coordinator, Presbytery and Synod staff person. I did go to that weekly Bible Study and out of that group came four Presbyterian ministers, an Episcopal priest, a church educator, and a church administrator communications director, all life long friends. What first appeared to me as a death, a loss, a tragedy of my life, opened a whole new world and gave me what became my wife and friend of 46 years, my vocation, my life. The Lord has walked with me.
Twenty years later, I was serving my third pastoral call, my dream church. It was in a county seat in a beautiful rural area just to my liking. The village had just one blinking traffic light, but it was a mecca of culture with multiple museums, a community theater, and opera company, a teaching hospital. The congregation boasted worship was the safest place to be as the congregation was filled with MDs. I was given a free pass at a brand new community gym. The school was excellent with a wonderful music program, choirs and bands for every class. The church had the best stewardship practice of any church I've known, and had a heart for mission. I was in heaven. But as hard as I tried, nothing I did there seemed to resonate. My last year there instead of seeking a new call, I worked my tail off trying to make it work with people there I loved and respected. My last summer there we led youth and several parents on a mission trip to Jamaica. We hosted the ecumenical Vacation Bible School using the Marketplace 29 AD curriculum. We set up tents on the church lawn. We recruited four times as many adults as usual to do small tasks, one of which was a baker who baked fresh bread every day. We all dressed in period robes. We doubled the number of children attending from the typical 30 to 59 the first day, growing to 70 the last day. The week was so spirit filled, that I bumbled over with the joy of it in the pulpit the following Sunday. The following Tuesday an elder visited me in my pastor's study challenging me. Who were all those children? In short, I was not allowed to have a victory. The Committee on Ministry was summoned to attend the next Session meeting. I was given a generous severance package for which I was grateful. Heart broken, demoralized, I was gone by the end of September.
I found myself reliving my parent's nightmare, what to do, where to go? Married with three young children going into seventh, fourth grades and pre-school with no home and minimal savings. We moved out of the manse into a winter rental, an old farmhouse a mile outside the village. We kept the kids in school. I doubled my therapy sessions, then group therapy. In January I enrolled in two graduate counseling courses at the nearby State University contemplating getting a masters in social work and career change. Eileen added some hours to her part time D.C.E. job in the neighboring town. Come June, we had to find a different rental, the worst possible time to be looking. But with the help of a real estate agent, we moved into a smaller and older farm house with an attic full of unpacked boxes. That summer I was healed enough to think that maybe God was not done with me yet. I had learned too much to leave parish ministry. So I began looking in earnest for a new call. I had a couple of interviews in nearby churches, but nothing came of them. School started up again, and nothing.
Then the first week of school, I got a phone call from a man I knew from serving on a Synod Christian Education Committee. He was serving as an interim Presbytery Executive in Erie. He had a church that needed an interim pastor. The pastor's wife had died after a battle with cancer. The grieving pastor had just moved on and they needed a spark to give them some life. We were not interested in a temporary interim position, wanting some stability after living in three houses within 9 months. He asked, "Are you interested? Do you think you can do it?" I said, "Yes! Thank you!" And thought, Thank you Jesus! The Lord has walked with me.
Six weeks into the school year, we moved our family to Erie. All of a sudden, my son went from the middle of the pack to one of the smartest kids in the class and fell in love with the smartest. The congregation loved me back into the pulpit. I did everything I could to breathe new life into an aging urban congregation disconnected from its neighborhood. The church had a gymnasium. The Erie churches had a church basketball league. Some neighborhood boys recruited me to coach them. We only had one bad fight that broke out after a tough game in the parking lot that needed police... The Lord has walked with me.
Our second week in Erie, I received a telephone call from a Pastor Nominating Committee chairperson in Montauk, New York, an isolated resort community at the VERY east end of Long Island. He was the committee's new leader after the previous chairperson resigned angry when the Presbytery Executive declined approving another candidate they really liked and wanted. I had been aggressively seeking a call all summer. They had my materials, but the timing just didn't work. I said, I had just gotten to this church, and couldn't think of moving until next summer at the earliest. Two weeks later I received a package of materials from them with a note saying they had an interim pastor serving them. Next summer didn't seem that far off. I looked over the material. Humm.... Oceanside community, manse with an ocean view! Humm.... The rest is history. We never had to worry about our next call. We moved August 1st the next summer. The Lord has walked with me.
Except that my rising ninth grade son was heartbroken to leave behind his first love. He soon got over it when cast in the school musical "Westside Story" in the role of Little John and made a name for himself when he made a video documentary of the show and set it to the song Bohemian Rhapsody as a class project in a video production class, an experience that launched his vocation as a professional photographer/cinematographer. Thank you, God! We had the time of our lives there for almost 12 years. I became their longest term pastor. When we celebrated their 75th Anniversary, I was their 21st pastor. You do the math! The community gave the Catholic Priest and me a special award a year after 9/11. My tenth year the church celebrated my ministry giving me a plaque. We were much loved. The Lord has walked with me.
Except Montauk is the self proclaimed surf fishing capital of the world and I don't fish! And then Eileen was let go from her part time D.C.E. job at the neighboring church. When the pastor retired, the interim pastor felt it his duty to clear out the staff and terminated her position. Later that year while I was convalescing from a radical prostatectomy, my Session fired Eileen as well. Eileen served the church very part time as church educator and administrator. Evidently some parents with children had their own ideas and won the ear of elders. What a low blow. I was ticked! How could they do that when I... Hiring one's spouse is always tricky! What does one do when you have a talented spouse? Sigh...
So we read the tea leaves, in spite of loving our life there, we started imagining a new future. I discerned that preaching was not my greatest gift to the church, and began looking for Presbytery positions. Never dreaming of an executive position, I applied for a couple of positions for associate for mission to no avail. Then I applied for a co-presbyter position and was asked to submit answers to follow up questions. Answering their questions set me on fire, but I didn't get that call. Then I noticed an ad for a General Presbyter position with the Presbytery of Lake Michigan framed as a pastor to the pastors. Put that way, I thought, I could do that. I had served in every type of community: rural, suburban, county seat, urban residential, village/resort, and in multiple pastoral roles: student intern, yoked multiple church parish, solo pastor, interim associate, interim pastor. A role as pastor to pastors finally made sense of my career path. My interview was a spiritual experience. My wife was at an APCE Cabinet meeting. They were all praying for me. My answers came easy. I was offered the position within an hour after the interview. I did not need the plane to fly home. At her next APCE meeting, they looked at Eileen and said, "You're free, why don't you be our next president." The Lord has walked with us.
Another eleven years of fulfilling ministry followed until I discerned that I had given my all and found a calling to serve Pine Island Church for a season. A perfect segway from a stressful ministry.
Did I mention that my dad died May 8th my freshman year in college? While grieving my mother regularly visited my aunt (dad's sister) in the hospital. She had an aggressive cancer and died two months after my dad. It was Aunt Ann who said you two should pay attention to each other. Mom had to move again, got a nursing job, and nine months later married Uncle Harry, her brother-in-law. She was married to my dad 29 years, and to my uncle for 32. I am witness to these things. Thanks be to God.
This is my unique story but I suspect it is the human story. It is for all those who step out of their comfort zone in faith trusting the risen living Lord to walk with them, daring to rise from heartbreak with God's help and live again. As I ponder my experience, the greatest blessings have come when I pushed through the heart ache of closed door endings, and climbed through the window God opened for me.
All transitions are hard. Pine Island Church is navigating a transition now. You engage, you love, you learn the gifts of ministry partners and build a life together, while coming to terms with their and your limitations and quirks. Members come and go, some grow old, some die too young, children grow up and go off to college and careers. The one constant is change. The life and ministry you've built for yourself and are comfortable with unravels before your eyes and comes to an end as you've known it. There's heartbreak. You feel lost, bewildered, and sometimes alone. But then if you pay attention, there appears an opening, a new opportunity to explore, the possibility of new life, renewed joy, and love again. Call it resurrection. Call it living with a risen Lord, whom death could not contain. I am witness to these things.
Jim Friedrich concludes that Eastertide preaching "is not to recite or argue the evidence for the resurrection but to help their community to become that evidence. May the whole world one day see and know a church which has been shocked into bliss--and has never recovered!"
Be the evidence my friends. Be the evidence!
The first Apostles got in trouble with the authorities for rocking the status quo. Taken before the council a second time after being given strict instructions by the high priest NOT to speak of a risen Jesus in public again, Peter and the other Apostles answered, "We are witnesses to these things." (Acts 5:27-32).
This blog post is this 21st Century Christian's witness to the risen living Jesus recognized in life's heartbreaking little deaths of transitions, the lost wandering, and invigorating new life that follows. This is my witness.
Raised in a Christian family, my mother's mantra which she repeated again and again as she told her story, our family's stories, "The Lord has walked with me." She told how she and her brother were playing alone in their parent's bedroom when she was nine, and Uncle Sammy was six years old. She was playing with a doll on her parent's bed. Uncle Sammy had found a handgun in my grandfather's bureau drawer and was exploring it, when all of a sudden "pow" it went off! A bullet hit her in the chest. It missed every major organ. After her recovery her Sunday School teacher commented, "The Lord must have been riding on that bullet." My mom died of dementia at the age of 87. Among her very few possessions with her in the Memory Care Unit, which she had held onto through all the moves to the many homes where she lived throughout her life, was that bullet wrapped in tissue, and the bundle of letters written to her by her third grade classmates. She recognized the presence of the risen Lord, not in the tragedy, but in her survival of this and subsequent trials: a first born with kidney failure, the stillbirth of her fourth child, welcoming a gay brother-in-law to live with the family in 1950's. A blessing, he fed and changed the diapers of my one year old sister during that difficult pregnancy. "The Lord has walked with me."
Hard difficult things happen in our lives that bring an end to some things, and open the way to the new. As my mother looked back on her life and now as I ponder my life, it is amazing how our richest blessings hers and mine have come following our most trying experiences, allowing us to say, "The Lord has walked with me. We are witnesses to these things."
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| Rickets's Glenn State Park, PA |
I was in music class in the band room the spring of my junior year in high school, when Mr. Baker, the principal stepped in and summoned me to teacher's office. He said, "Your dad has had a heart attack. His heart arrested, but because he was already in the hospital, they were able to revive him." When I finally got to the hospital I learned that he had some broken ribs, from their pounding on him. He lived, returned to work, but retired on disability the next January at the age of 52, my senior year. My parents didn't know what to do. We had to move out of the church manse once daddy retired. Where to go? They had little savings. My brothers just completed college and seminary, my sister was in college. I was still in high school. My parents and I had just visited ministry friends the summer before. They lived in an apartment in a turn of the century banker's mansion set up at the time of their death as an estate for retired ministers who had served that Presbytery. There were three apartments. One was unoccupied upstairs. These friends suggested my parents call the man who oversaw the estate. His name was Lee Brown. Mom called explaining our predicament. The first words out of his mouth were "I don't think that will be a problem." Did I mention the apartment was rent free? The Lord has walked with me.
My parents moved in early March. I stayed in the community until I graduated from high school. I lived on a farm with Clair and Mid Hammond, good church friends and my Senior High Sunday School teacher. Getting into the car after my high school commencement was one of the hardest moments of my life. While my classmates went off to parties, I left everything I knew and drove two hours to join my parents in a place where I knew no one. It was a stark contrast after a senior year of shining like a star in that small rural school. I felt lost and alone.
Except I had visited my parents on Mother's Day weekend, and went to church with them. I summoned the courage to attend the young adult Sunday School class in the pastor's study. I was the youngest in the room. One of the girls was nine months pregnant and due any day. That took up most of the oxygen in the room. When in walked a girl with long brown hair, wearing a white dress with a small flower print. She lit up the room with her smile. I would later learn that she was a cousin to everyone in the room except me, and the daughter of Lee Brown! She was all I could think about on the drive back to the Valley. Did I mention this church is in Paradise, PA right across the highway from Christ's Home for Children?
So I moved into a hot unfinished room in the third floor attic of that old mansion. I got a job pumping gas at a station just down the road, close enough that I rode my bike to work. I ran that gas station pumping gas, selling cigarettes, all summer alone, by myself. Except, that girl I noticed at church called me on the phone and invited me to a Bible Study group with her friends. She knew who I was because of her father. The rest is history. We had our first date that August. The next August we became a committed couple. The next August she said "Yes" when I asked her to marry me. The next August we were married. The next August we returned from orientation as newly commissioned Presbyterian missionaries headed for Brazil. This April 30th, next week she will retire after forty two years as a missionary, mission interpreter, pastor's spouse, Director of Christian Education, CROP Walk Coordinator, Connections Coordinator, Presbytery and Synod staff person. I did go to that weekly Bible Study and out of that group came four Presbyterian ministers, an Episcopal priest, a church educator, and a church administrator communications director, all life long friends. What first appeared to me as a death, a loss, a tragedy of my life, opened a whole new world and gave me what became my wife and friend of 46 years, my vocation, my life. The Lord has walked with me.
Twenty years later, I was serving my third pastoral call, my dream church. It was in a county seat in a beautiful rural area just to my liking. The village had just one blinking traffic light, but it was a mecca of culture with multiple museums, a community theater, and opera company, a teaching hospital. The congregation boasted worship was the safest place to be as the congregation was filled with MDs. I was given a free pass at a brand new community gym. The school was excellent with a wonderful music program, choirs and bands for every class. The church had the best stewardship practice of any church I've known, and had a heart for mission. I was in heaven. But as hard as I tried, nothing I did there seemed to resonate. My last year there instead of seeking a new call, I worked my tail off trying to make it work with people there I loved and respected. My last summer there we led youth and several parents on a mission trip to Jamaica. We hosted the ecumenical Vacation Bible School using the Marketplace 29 AD curriculum. We set up tents on the church lawn. We recruited four times as many adults as usual to do small tasks, one of which was a baker who baked fresh bread every day. We all dressed in period robes. We doubled the number of children attending from the typical 30 to 59 the first day, growing to 70 the last day. The week was so spirit filled, that I bumbled over with the joy of it in the pulpit the following Sunday. The following Tuesday an elder visited me in my pastor's study challenging me. Who were all those children? In short, I was not allowed to have a victory. The Committee on Ministry was summoned to attend the next Session meeting. I was given a generous severance package for which I was grateful. Heart broken, demoralized, I was gone by the end of September.
I found myself reliving my parent's nightmare, what to do, where to go? Married with three young children going into seventh, fourth grades and pre-school with no home and minimal savings. We moved out of the manse into a winter rental, an old farmhouse a mile outside the village. We kept the kids in school. I doubled my therapy sessions, then group therapy. In January I enrolled in two graduate counseling courses at the nearby State University contemplating getting a masters in social work and career change. Eileen added some hours to her part time D.C.E. job in the neighboring town. Come June, we had to find a different rental, the worst possible time to be looking. But with the help of a real estate agent, we moved into a smaller and older farm house with an attic full of unpacked boxes. That summer I was healed enough to think that maybe God was not done with me yet. I had learned too much to leave parish ministry. So I began looking in earnest for a new call. I had a couple of interviews in nearby churches, but nothing came of them. School started up again, and nothing.
Then the first week of school, I got a phone call from a man I knew from serving on a Synod Christian Education Committee. He was serving as an interim Presbytery Executive in Erie. He had a church that needed an interim pastor. The pastor's wife had died after a battle with cancer. The grieving pastor had just moved on and they needed a spark to give them some life. We were not interested in a temporary interim position, wanting some stability after living in three houses within 9 months. He asked, "Are you interested? Do you think you can do it?" I said, "Yes! Thank you!" And thought, Thank you Jesus! The Lord has walked with me.
Six weeks into the school year, we moved our family to Erie. All of a sudden, my son went from the middle of the pack to one of the smartest kids in the class and fell in love with the smartest. The congregation loved me back into the pulpit. I did everything I could to breathe new life into an aging urban congregation disconnected from its neighborhood. The church had a gymnasium. The Erie churches had a church basketball league. Some neighborhood boys recruited me to coach them. We only had one bad fight that broke out after a tough game in the parking lot that needed police... The Lord has walked with me.
Our second week in Erie, I received a telephone call from a Pastor Nominating Committee chairperson in Montauk, New York, an isolated resort community at the VERY east end of Long Island. He was the committee's new leader after the previous chairperson resigned angry when the Presbytery Executive declined approving another candidate they really liked and wanted. I had been aggressively seeking a call all summer. They had my materials, but the timing just didn't work. I said, I had just gotten to this church, and couldn't think of moving until next summer at the earliest. Two weeks later I received a package of materials from them with a note saying they had an interim pastor serving them. Next summer didn't seem that far off. I looked over the material. Humm.... Oceanside community, manse with an ocean view! Humm.... The rest is history. We never had to worry about our next call. We moved August 1st the next summer. The Lord has walked with me.
Except that my rising ninth grade son was heartbroken to leave behind his first love. He soon got over it when cast in the school musical "Westside Story" in the role of Little John and made a name for himself when he made a video documentary of the show and set it to the song Bohemian Rhapsody as a class project in a video production class, an experience that launched his vocation as a professional photographer/cinematographer. Thank you, God! We had the time of our lives there for almost 12 years. I became their longest term pastor. When we celebrated their 75th Anniversary, I was their 21st pastor. You do the math! The community gave the Catholic Priest and me a special award a year after 9/11. My tenth year the church celebrated my ministry giving me a plaque. We were much loved. The Lord has walked with me.
Except Montauk is the self proclaimed surf fishing capital of the world and I don't fish! And then Eileen was let go from her part time D.C.E. job at the neighboring church. When the pastor retired, the interim pastor felt it his duty to clear out the staff and terminated her position. Later that year while I was convalescing from a radical prostatectomy, my Session fired Eileen as well. Eileen served the church very part time as church educator and administrator. Evidently some parents with children had their own ideas and won the ear of elders. What a low blow. I was ticked! How could they do that when I... Hiring one's spouse is always tricky! What does one do when you have a talented spouse? Sigh...
So we read the tea leaves, in spite of loving our life there, we started imagining a new future. I discerned that preaching was not my greatest gift to the church, and began looking for Presbytery positions. Never dreaming of an executive position, I applied for a couple of positions for associate for mission to no avail. Then I applied for a co-presbyter position and was asked to submit answers to follow up questions. Answering their questions set me on fire, but I didn't get that call. Then I noticed an ad for a General Presbyter position with the Presbytery of Lake Michigan framed as a pastor to the pastors. Put that way, I thought, I could do that. I had served in every type of community: rural, suburban, county seat, urban residential, village/resort, and in multiple pastoral roles: student intern, yoked multiple church parish, solo pastor, interim associate, interim pastor. A role as pastor to pastors finally made sense of my career path. My interview was a spiritual experience. My wife was at an APCE Cabinet meeting. They were all praying for me. My answers came easy. I was offered the position within an hour after the interview. I did not need the plane to fly home. At her next APCE meeting, they looked at Eileen and said, "You're free, why don't you be our next president." The Lord has walked with us.
Another eleven years of fulfilling ministry followed until I discerned that I had given my all and found a calling to serve Pine Island Church for a season. A perfect segway from a stressful ministry.
Did I mention that my dad died May 8th my freshman year in college? While grieving my mother regularly visited my aunt (dad's sister) in the hospital. She had an aggressive cancer and died two months after my dad. It was Aunt Ann who said you two should pay attention to each other. Mom had to move again, got a nursing job, and nine months later married Uncle Harry, her brother-in-law. She was married to my dad 29 years, and to my uncle for 32. I am witness to these things. Thanks be to God.
This is my unique story but I suspect it is the human story. It is for all those who step out of their comfort zone in faith trusting the risen living Lord to walk with them, daring to rise from heartbreak with God's help and live again. As I ponder my experience, the greatest blessings have come when I pushed through the heart ache of closed door endings, and climbed through the window God opened for me.
All transitions are hard. Pine Island Church is navigating a transition now. You engage, you love, you learn the gifts of ministry partners and build a life together, while coming to terms with their and your limitations and quirks. Members come and go, some grow old, some die too young, children grow up and go off to college and careers. The one constant is change. The life and ministry you've built for yourself and are comfortable with unravels before your eyes and comes to an end as you've known it. There's heartbreak. You feel lost, bewildered, and sometimes alone. But then if you pay attention, there appears an opening, a new opportunity to explore, the possibility of new life, renewed joy, and love again. Call it resurrection. Call it living with a risen Lord, whom death could not contain. I am witness to these things.
Jim Friedrich concludes that Eastertide preaching "is not to recite or argue the evidence for the resurrection but to help their community to become that evidence. May the whole world one day see and know a church which has been shocked into bliss--and has never recovered!"
Be the evidence my friends. Be the evidence!
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