New Life

I finally made a discovery today. I suppose it could be considered an epiphany of sorts even though none of what occurred to me is necessarily new. Yet the implications of how neatly everything came together this Sabbath are so profound that I could barely contain my emotions.

I have been reappointed to another part-time charge, and the transition has been a challenging one for me and for my family. While I was on hiatus we began attending a United Methodist Church near our home, a much larger church than what we had become accustomed to due to my appointments to smaller rural churches. This church is big, it's relatively new, the pastor is a great guy, and the church has ministries for young and old alike. My children and my wife had gotten pretty deeply involved in Sunday school and were looking forward to really delving into the life of this new church.

When I was reappointed, my family became concerned that just as they were getting settled into this new church that I would expect them to stop what they were doing to follow me. As it turns out, my new church has a very early service and is not so far that I cannot join my family in worship later in the morning after enjoying worship with my new congregation. I even had time to stop at a nursing home to visit with a parishioner on my way to my "other" church! All this without even trying to rush.

In "big" church this morning we celebrated the baptism of a baby boy. Now I've seen many baptisms for infants and converts alike, and it is always a good time of celebration. Today, however, coupled with the other pastor's sermon about hope and witnessing the child being baptized with a word from the pastor about why we celebrate baptism at infancy - and after a visit to a nursing home where there seemed to be nothing but old faces with no more hope and no more life - the true meaning of what it is to be baptized (not what WE do but what the Lord does) came crashing in all around me.

I was never so consciously aware of my sins as I was today. Now you might wonder how such awareness can be a good thing with all the misery and despair that comes with such knowledge and conviction - and I assure you that I was a "convict" - but with the pastor's sermon about hope, my own sermon about what it means to live in humility and watching this precious child be baptized into the faith, I was never more sure of the Lord's grace even as I was aware of my own transgressions.

This life can easily overwhelm us. When we look around and see such a broken world, it is not hard to be so overcome with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness especially when in a nursing home with so many who are doing nothing more than waiting to die, so many who are not even aware of their surroundings. Yet in the midst of this chaos and brokenness and loneliness and pain, the Lord makes Himself known in the most subtle of ways, through the life of a newborn child, "for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of His own eternity". Wisdom of Solomon 2:23

Take heart, people of faith! The Lord is indeed with us!