Gotta write something

Because it has been two weeks and I have not written anything.

Right now it is a Saturday afternoon and I am hanging out in the family room with Chuck and Tom. We are watching Basketball! And it has been pretty interesting so far and when we are not watching tv - they are reading and I am playing a computer game. This is what we call relaxing in our advanced years.

I am preaching tomorrow on Isaiah 43 - "God is going to do a new thing" And I have thought a lot about that. This was written for people in the exile who were going through "dislocation." Their country had been taken over by the Babylonians and the righteous remnant were actually living in Babylon. They were in a place of instability, loss, grief and alienation.

I ended up finding a wonderful quote from Walter Brueggemann about dislocation and how we experience that today. I have to say - especially as you get older and everything seems so different. Everything like media, the institutions we used to count on, our famjlies and our health. It is just different and I have many, many conversations with people about that. We are living in the midst of change, of dislocation, of - we hope - transformation. But it is so often unsettling.

Brueggemannn says (and of course, I will quote him tomorrow!) that our response to dislocation is often denial and despair. The denial is the denial of our feelings of loss (anger, sadness, grief) and the despair is lived out with a cynicism and a detachment. The despair is also founded on a belief that things are getting worse and worse and worse. The glory days are over.

So, this is the word - God is doing a new thing,. In the midst of it all, I trust that. I preach what I know - that God is doing a new thing

But at the same time - especially as we live in the losses of change (like the loss of my sister which I think about a lot with Tom visiting) we all want things the way they used to be. I want her back, I want my parents back. I would like my old more fit body back while we are at it.

But I do trust that here - today - and tomorrow. God is doing a new thing with me, with Tom, with Karl Road Christian Church. With everyone of us.