The Pastor's Page

We are less than 40 hours away from a whole new year. While our starting and ending dates for the year are quite arbitrary, they have a tremendous symbolism! We do much more than simply turn the page on the calendar, or start a new tax season. We make promises and set resolutions. We decide to lose weight. I have a friend striving for sobriety in the coming year. Their start date, January 2^nd. Honestly, they wanted to get the holiday season and all its temptations behind them before, feeling they would pretty much guarantee failure if the began in the middle of a season with so many temptations.

First Presbyterian Church is facing an exciting year. The challenges and adventures, the rewards and the struggles are, at this point, all hypothetical. They are signposts on the horizon, mile markers along the road, things we use to judge our progress on our journey, to help us keep direction as we travel.

Where will you go in 2019? Where will you start, and where is it you would like to find yourself at the end of the year? I know that my calendar changed dramatically 6 weeks ago. I find myself altering long kept schedules and making plans for destinations and tasks I never thought would be mine.

Going through that process of redirection does involve some excitement, but it also involves a sense of loss. The regularity of one schedule is replaced by the real possibility of one that is much more organic, always changing, moving, and reforming. One of the “exciting” things would involve the need to learn a new language in less than six months. Considering how little I learned in 2 years of high school Spanish and my poor grades in that class, it is a daunting task as well.

All of this simply leads us to the fact that our God is a lover of surprises. God loves to challenge us. The Holy Spirit throws things in our path that constantly drive us toward our that same Spirit. We are faced with opportunities that will be totally impossible without complete reliance on the power of that Spirit.

This could be an extremely frustrating existence if it were not for the face that we know we have a Heavenly Father who loves us and cares for us. We can embrace the reality of these future events as being placed along our journey for the express purpose of leading us into an ever deepening relationship with the Triune God. These are not events to overwhelm us. No, they are opportunities to marvel at the God who makes us conquerors in all things!

Pastor Craig