Pastoral Ponderings—“Welcome Home”- Jan. 17, 2024

We heard the greeting “Welcome home!” countless times in I couldn’t tell you how many different settings when we were at Disney this past week.  Sounds like it must be one of their new things these days.  Despite the fact the I know it must be some kind of marketing ploy, it’s still a powerful phrase that resonates on multiple levels.  But how can you call Disney “home” so that the greeting can in any way make sense, when none of us really live there?  Yet the term still fits in wonderful ways.

The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” talks about “core memories”– those memories that stay with us, and somehow help shape us– to the extent that one of the Disney shirts I saw many times walking around the parks read “This is a Core Memory Day.”  Disney’s movies, and the whole idea of their “Magic Kingdom” that is such a draw for many of us, leads me to want to describe our trips there more as a pilgrimage than a vacation. For many, facets of Disney form huge chunks of the fabric of our lives.  So maybe “welcome home” fits.  At least it does for us, and it certainly has a positive, powerful feel to it.

It takes getting away like this to our Disney “home” to realize that maybe the same is true for the church, and the Kingdom of God that Jesus talks about.  Is it too bold to say that I think Disney in some ways tries to emulate the welcoming grace of the Kingdom of God with their claim to be “most magical place on earth?”  Maybe we could re-evaluate how we think of and how we do church, that it might do us as well as it does Disney, to use the phrase in the same way for our guests, greeting them as well with a warm “welcome home!”

One of my Army buddies in the Cincinnati area is considering starting a church that doesn’t really fit the mold.  He’s toying with ways to describe what he’d like to start, and offered this starting point– “if you are into Jesus, into loving others… a bit more open and a bit less judgmental, let’s talk.”  In our contentious, broken and often offensive world today, shouldn’t a place that feels warm and welcoming, rather than abrasive and divisive, have a wonderfully attractive sense of “home” that we so often yearn for?  I’m SO proud to say that our church family (in all three locations!) DOES exude that kind of welcoming  warmth.

So we are blessed to be able to bring God’s kind of magic into our communities, and can honestly say to those who are lost, hurt, searching, the least, the last, the lost—“welcome home.”  I hope you can feel that reality too, so that you, too, can be comfortable and excited about welcoming others into the warmth of God’s grace in our places of worship.  Keep up the good work, and keep sharing the fantasmic blessing of God’s family that Jesus has welcome us into, and welcomes others into as well! —Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—Stuck 

We awoke early this morning to get ready to run away together for a little while—on a pilgrimage to the Magic Kingdom at Disney.  Our son was giving us a lift on his way to work, so we spent the night with the newlywed couple, and minutes after we started moving this morning, I heard this awful exclamation—never a good thing—when Darling Wife broke the quiet of the morning calling out “WHAT?!?”

The flight was delayed. Not just a little bit, but from a 9:30 AM flight, to a 7:30 PM flight!  Quite the wrench in our plans for an easy, relaxing flight.

But despite the long delay, Kristopher still had to get to work at the same time, so we still arrived early, tried our best to fight the inevitable, but now, waiting.  Thank God for the USO!

Ironically, I was just reading up on a resilience author for an opportunity to better connect with the Southeast Schools (Charlestown Church and Ravenna footprint—where they had a student suicide just before Thanksgiving), who was talking about the importance of mental flexibility for resilience.  In other words, how flexible can you be when a wrench gets thrown into your plans?  And how often does THAT happen?  Whether something as relatively inane as a flight delay (annoying though it may be), to major disappointments and losses, life is chock full of wrenches chucked into our plans.

Resilience, or how we bounce back when Bad Things happen, is not just a psychological, but a spiritual skill set as well.  I’ve spent a lot of my career dealing with suicide, usually precipitated by what seems to be a major wrench thrown in the middle of a vulnerable life.  What might be just a Bad Day to someone with good resilience—being dumped by a girlfriend or something—can be deadly if it shakes your sense of meaning and a place in this world.

If not for our faith, are we anything other than a cosmic accident?  So when life gets messy, why bother?  Unless there’s something more to life—as our faith boldly asserts, proclaiming that we are treasured children of the God of all creation, also called to make a difference in making God’s love real for those who might feel like the least, the last, the lost.  And for whom even difficult times can be filled with spiritual blessings.

We’re still not excited about the wrench thrown into our plans—but I’m getting to overhear Darling Wife being a blessing in conversation with others while I’m being able to catch up on a long to do list, and keeping my eyes open for other God Sightings that will come from this delay.  How do you handle the wrenches chucked into your life?   Still waiting… Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—Happy New Year…

The day dawned just like any other—and yet, not.  This day had never ever come before, and was so absolutely unique, that it would never come again.  In some ways, it seemed like such an ordinary day, yet it marked the end of everything else that had ever come before, while at the same time, it was a beautiful new beginning.  It was such a brief flash in the cosmic pan that though it was such a dramatic day, it was over almost as quickly as it had begun.  Happy new year—and a perfectly unique opportunity to start everything new.  Yet the same thing could be said of every single day of your life!

I don’t think our cats were all that excited about a new year dawning.  It might even have been annoying to them as our celebrations interrupted their sleep (they don’t get to their wild playing until after about 3 am).  I didn’t see any of the squirrels, chipmunks, deer or turkey in the area partying wildly either, so why do we?  Are we just that eager to have a new start that we make sure we have it in our calendars every year?

Yet the Great God of all creation invites us all to a new start with Jesus, and with everything that really matters, any time we need it!  Maybe that’s why I’ve never gotten all that excited about New Year’s Eve—it’s a little artificial—where the opportunity for a new start with God is as real as real can get, and you don’t have to wait for the calendar to come around to that opportunity again.  And that’s a good thing, because New Year’s Day is as slow as Christmas!

Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying a good party, so I hope you had a good one!  But remember that the best part of any new year’s celebration, the new start that it offers, is available EVERY day, or at least every day with journey with Jesus!  So if you’re afraid you’ll not be able to make it through January with your New Year’s resolution, or even if you’ve already messed up your new year—fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people—unto you is offered this day, a new start, as fresh as a newborn baby, only a prayer away!  For this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!  Pastor Jim