Dear Redeemer Family,
I’m sure that many of you have been hoping (as have I) that we will be able to meet together, in person, soon. There seems to be an awful lot of chatter this week about “reopening” - with a pretty wide variety of opinions about what we should all do next. Rest assured, I am in regular conversation about this with our Bishop, pastors of other churches, knowledgeable health care providers, our Staff, and our Vestry.
I know, I know - we want a plan. I want a plan! Dear friends, those of you who know me, know that I love strategic planning. Few things are as exciting for me as brewing a fresh pot of coffee and breaking out the white board. However, that is exactly what we do not need to do right now. We don’t have enough information and we do not have a clear enough vision of what the next few months will look like for us to roll out a step-by-step plan for reopening.
Fear not. The minute we have enough data - that’s exactly what we’ll do.
In the meantime, we get to hear what my kids hear from me 5,438 times a day, “You just need to be patient.”
Oh, the joy of waiting. I was thinking this afternoon about some of the hard things we may be feeling as we all wait for church, school, and the economy to reopen.
This is a Frustration to our Independence: I think one of the most annoying and difficult things about waiting to reopen is that this is a decision that is, largely, made for us and not made by us. We are not in control, and we feel that reality more viscerally with every passing day.
This is a Challenge to our Individuality: Additionally, waiting to reopen is (for the most part) not an individual decision, but a communal one. This requires our society to act as a group for the good of the whole. While that sounds like a nice principle in theory, what it feels like in practice is sacrificing what I want to do for the good of other people.
This is a Drain on Our Energy: Talking about reopening, strategizing about reopening, watching the news as other people argue about reopening, reading articles online about reopening… are you tired yet? Me too.
It’s hard to wait. It’s even harder to wait when you don’t know how long you’re going to be waiting.
In that sense, this time is (give me some rope here) a bit like what all of life is like for a Christian. We await the return of our King, but we don’t know how long we’re going to be waiting.
The whole Christian life is lived between two Advents, the first and second coming of the Lord Jesus. If we knew how long we’d be waiting, this whole thing would be a heck of a lot easier. However, it would also require far less faith. You see - you can “white knuckle” just about anything if you know how long you have to hold on.
A lot of us have been “white knuckling” this quarantine. We’ve been hanging on through sheer will power - determined to “get through this.” However - as this time stretches on and on - our ability to hang in there is going to weaken and one of two things will happen:
We’ll break. “I just can’t take this anymore. I don’t care what anyone says, I'm going to do what I want.”
We’ll grow. We’ll finally enter into the rhythms and practices that God has been inviting us to take up all along. Praying throughout the day, reading scripture every day, communicating with our neighbors and seeking to meet their needs, serving the poor and vulnerable in our city.
Here’s just a little something to help us while we wait. This is a song written by Flo Paris Oaks from Rain for Roots. It’s called, appropriately, “It’s Hard to Wait.” I’ve been humming it as I putter around the house this week. The chorus goes like this:
There is gonna be a day
Every low valley He will raise
There is gonna be a day
Hills and mountains gonna be made plain
There is gonna be a day
Winding roads gonna be made straight
Comfort, comfort, comfort, comfort
It's hard to wait
So hard to wait
You can listen to the whole song here (written by Flo Paris Oakes, ©2015 Flo Paris Music).
Friends, we have a lot of waiting to do. Let’s not “white knuckle” it and let’s not waste it. I am eager for us to reopen and we will just as soon as our Bishop, our elected officials, our studied and credentialed health organizations, and your Vestry deem it wise to do so.
Until then, I am waiting with you and (more importantly) the Lord is waiting with you.
In the Father’s love,
Dan
