The Change Will Do You Good

Sheryl Crow sings, “A Change Will Do You Good.” I like Sheryl Crow and will likely be listening to her a lot next week when I take a few days off. We were supposed to go to Santa Fe with friends to enjoy the mountains, landscape, city, and the green and red chile. We booked the time so I could rest a bit before Pastor Pam goes on sabbatical from April 5 – July 5. (I obviously won’t be leaving town then!) Due to the pandemic, New Mexico would rather we stay away. Lately, our lives have made us a bit more cautious as well. So, vacation will be a staycation where I work in the basement and cook New Mexican Cuisine.  It is a change. But the change will do us good.

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Pastor Pam will write soon to tell you more about her sabbatical (which was postponed due to the pandemic for a year). Her time away will allow study, rest, and encounter with great preaching and the mystics of the Christian faith. It will be a change, and the change will do her good.

For the last couple of years, Anne Williams has been a full-time Minister for Learning here and a full-time seminary student – at the same time. She will finish her studies soon and then be off to internship, and then ordination. Sometime this summer she will end her 15-year run at HTLC and her life will change. So will ours. We are already preparing for a transition, which will bring change. The change will do her good; it will do the Church good too.

We’ve learned a lot about change in the last year. It has been almost twelve months since we last gathered for worship in the sanctuary. As we continue to watch the pandemic’s mark on the community, we seem to be nearing a point where we able to slowly come together again. We’ll gather groups of 10 or less, then 25. When we reach the thresholds that allow for 50, we will plan worship. Yet, even as we come back together, there will be change. The last year will leave indelible marks of change. We will be a changed community when we gather. The change of the last year has done us good. And the change to come will do us good.

Change is good because it is a creative movement that moves, lurches, strolls, stumbles into the future. We can proclaim it is good because the future is in God’s ever-faithful, ever-creative, ever-gracious hands. While change swirls around us, one thing remains constant – God, revealed in Christ. As the preacher of Hebrews tells us, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

Let go and trust. The change will do you good.
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Pax Christi – Tim Olson, Lead Pastor