Are we there yet?

So, I think I've worked over 20 hours in the last two days, and we've got a sick baby who has so many boogers and woke up at 12, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, and 6 because of it, and also I've been getting this cold for like 5 days (I'm taking all the zicam, mom), and it's like 10:30 and I'm too tired for my little brain to be creative....SO, here's part of an article I wrote for my church newsletter today:

When I was little (ahem, younger), our family used to take a lot of road trips. Me and my sisters would cram in the back of the Ford Tempo with just about every toy we could fit in our little backpacks, all smooshed in, and we’d drive and drive and drive. Like every kid, we bickered half of the way: “Mom, she touched my leg!” “Dad, she’s bugging me!”, etc. And, like every kid, we asked the question that has been asked of every parent in the history of the world: “Are we there yet?”

Every day, we had a sense of where were going: what city we had motel reservations at, parks we could stop at, museums, etc. (8-year old me was mostly concerned about one thing on vacation: the motel pool. When were we going to get there so we could play in the pool?). Knowing the fun things that we’d be doing, probably made us ask it even more. Are we there yet?

I think most of us are aware of the shifts we’ve seen in the life of the church in the U.S. Technology is developing at exponential rates, the culture is changing, needs are changing, etc. We’re aware that we’re in between places, from how church used to be and from what church will look like in the years to come.

There are days when we might just be tempted to just turn around and go back, even though we know that we can’t really do that. And there are days when we want to ask over and over and over again, “are we there yet?”

 

Before we ask that though, I think there’s another question we need to ask ourselves: do we know where we’re going?

In a life of faith, in some ways the answer will always be “no.” That a life of trusting God means taking steps out into an unknown future, trusting that God’s going to be here. But, in the midst of that, we’re called to be discerning together. We are invited to share wisdom, share passion, ideas, hopes, and our imaginations for our community of faith. 

The rest of the article was about Bethel, so I'll just stop there. :-)