Chaplain's Corner

Another year is gone.  That’s right, you and I have spent the last 365 days writing “2009” on letters and checks and all sorts of other documents.  We have survived another year, we are about to enter 2010 and as we do we can anticipate the same mixture of regular days, sprinkled with a few tragedies and a few highlights.  After all, this is the way life is.
 
As we look back at 2009, there are probably a few days that we will never forget and them many, many days that were not worth remembering.  Some of the events that left the most indelible marks on our memory were tragic: the death of a loved one, an accident that changed everything, a decision to leave a marriage, or abandon a relationship.  But there may have been a few memories that were sweet: the birth of a child or grandchild, a wedding or graduation or engagement, the purchase of a new home or new car or the decision to retire, just to name a few.
 
These events are common to people or all races of all faiths, of people from every level of economic privilege or disadvantage.  These kinds of events have taken place for millennium and will continue to take place as long as people inhabit this planet.  So in some ways, 2009 was just another year.  It was, but then again maybe it wasn’t.  Just because these events are common to human experience doesn’t mean that they won’t drive markers into our consciousness that alter our lives radically.  Even though things stay the same – they do change sometimes for the better but not always.

Maybe you look back over your shoulder at 2009 and it was a horrible year.  Its passing couldn’t come soon enough!  You hope that as 2010 begins that it will be the beginning of a better time in your life.  I hope so too.  But perhaps my longing for you, whoever you are, is a bit different than your own longing for yourself.  Now we are all certainly allowed to have our won longings and we can keep them too ourselves or we can share them.  But if I might, I would like to share my longings for those of you who read my words throughout the year.  These longings are not just deep desires that I hope on your behalf, but they are mine for myself as well.  These longs have to do with three universal realities that each of us live with:  our past, our present and our future.

First, I have a longing that each of us will receive the grace of God we need to deal with our past.  Agathon, a Greek poet that lived 450 years before Jesus wrote, “Even God cannot change the past.”  He is right, but he stopped short of telling us what God can do with our past.  God can redeem our past.  What do I mean by that?  Well, so many of us live with our past as if it were an invisible backpack that weighs 100 pounds. This backpack is full of all sorts of heaviness.  Sometimes it is the heaviness of regret and guilt over past failures.  Sometimes it is the heaviness over the shame we picked up over how others treated us.  Sometimes it is the heaviness that comes from the sorrows we feel over life’s losses. This backpack weighs us down; it keeps us focusing on the past and sometimes prevents us from really living in the present or having any hope for the future.

It is my longing that you and I can drop that backpack by the side of our road and leave it there.  Not because it doesn’t matter, our past does have a powerful way of forming who we are; but because God can redeem the past and turn all our regret and guilt and shame and hurt into something that can bless others.  God’s grace and his redeeming love have the power to take the worst of our past and transform it into a means of blessing others.  So remember, although God can not change your past, he can redeem it, all we need do is bring our past to Him and trust him with it.  It is absolutely amazing what God can do with the trash of our past!

Second, my longing for us is captured in the words of an oft quoted Greek poet, Horace (BC 65-8).  Horace encouraged the people of his time to “Seize the day”.   What a powerful word, “seize”.   It means to “grab hold of” something.  Or as the Psalmist, an ancient Hebrew poet put it, “This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Today is a gift God gives us, a gift to embrace, a gift to enjoy, and a gift to use for to love God and share God’s love with others.  The value of a day is not measured in how much we have accomplished, but in how well we have loved?  My children and wife will not be blessed by my reporting that I accomplished all my goals for the day.  They will be blessed if they come to the end of the day with a feeling in their hearts that I loved them.  If the greatest of all commands is that we love God and each other, then we need to seize the day and use it to love.  This is a longing I have for all of us in this coming year, that we will seize each of the 365 days we are given and use them to love God wholeheartedly and to love others as we love ourselves.

Mt third longing for you and for myself is that we look out into our future with hope.  An African proverb says, “For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”  But how do we prepare for the future.  Well, it depends a lot on how far out we are looking.  I tend not to focus much on tomorrow or next week, next month or even next year.  I am given to looking out into eternity – the far future.

Not that I haven’t prepared for my future.  After all, I did finish high school, go to college and then to seminary.  I did apply for jobs and engage in a career.  We planned a family and are making preparations for retirement in 8-9 years.  But I tend to be a person who keeps my eyes way out on the horizon of time, to that spot where time and eternity meet, when time shall be no more and there is the promise that I can be with God in a way that I can’t be right now.
 
If you look out that far into the future; then how can we be prepared for that?  Well, I know what I am going to say might be perfectly predictable, after all, I make no apologies for embracing the Christian Faith,  I have spent 32 years devoting myself to encouraging and advancing the Christian Faith and I am more committed to the Faith now than I have ever been in my life.  But the best way I know to prepare for the future, whether it be tomorrow or that point way out there on the horizon when God brings all things earthly to an end, is to place my faith in God today.

Some hear those words and they sound like religious platitudes.  I say those words and they are the description of how I have come to terms with my past, how I get through each day and what gives me hope for the future.  When I say I live by faith in God I speak of the God who reveals himself in the Bible, the eternal God who has always been and who possesses my future as his present.  I speak of a God who loves me so much, not at all because I am lovable, but because He is love.  The God who has the power to redeem my past, guide me in the present and promises to secure for me a future that is nothing short of glorious, not at all because I am deserving, but simply because He wants to, asking only one thing of me.  That I will forsake my stupid pride and open my heart to receive these all as gifts that come through the grace offered to you and me through Jesus.
 
In all honesty, 2010 is a mystery to me.  I have no idea what will happen.  I may die this next year?  Many will.  I may experience the greatest joy I have ever known, many will.  I may face challenges that make every other challenge I have ever faced seem small, many will.  But I am choosing to face 2010 believing that God will walk with me each day and that if I trust him instead of myself, that whatever I need for each day. He will provide. Good bye 2009 and like it or not, here we go into the New Year.  May we go with God!