You, Me, Some Words

“Just when I thought I was out … they puuulll me back in” (Please read in your best Al Pacino voice).

In truth, it didn’t take much pulling, but I am indeed back in.  After three months of full retirement, I start this Sunday, October 5, as the part-time “retired supply” pastor for Nine Mile and Gates Chapel United Methodist Churches here in Gilmer County.

And I’m excited … and nervous … as I have been with every new appointment over the past 44 years.  There is something about stepping into a new church (or, in this case, two) that’s kind of strange, to be honest.  And it’s just as strange to be the church receiving a new pastor.  Will this work out? What wonders await us? Is this the best the conference could do for us? I think I LIKE this preacher. What’s your name again?

That match made in Methodism that starts always with Sunday, the Lord’s Day, is a moment of amazing grace and mutual trust, as a congregation welcomes into their life a new pastor, and a new pastor steps into a community of folks who already share history, heartaches, and hopes.  

And that amazing grace can be lost, of course, and the trust broken, but on that first Sunday, pastor and people meet in a crystalline moment of divine possibility.  We meet in the love God has for all of us—the same love all of us are commanded to have for each other.

So, Sunday morning—9:30 at Gates Chapel, 11:00 at Nine Mile—we’ll begin.  We all know how fragile this church stuff can be, and how miraculous.  Each of us comes uniquely messed up and uniquely gifted, each of us needing grace and offering it.  And we all come trusting Christ, who calls us to the same place at the same time.  We all come with rejoicing in the love divine that never ends.  We all come with thanksgiving for the gifts we’re about to be to each other.