Rev. Jill Duffield
Senior Pastor
I am revisiting a book I read a few years ago, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.
The authors, there are three of them, want to help readers navigate the onslaught of information and the relentless, expansive, fast change in which we find ourselves living. The book is of the genre that uses words like “scalable” and “amplifiers.” Hence, sometimes I glaze over at the jargon, only to be grabbed by a sentence that feels all-too-resonant in our ongoing pandemic reality. Sentences like this one:
“In order to stay successful in a world of accelerating change, we need to find ways to learn faster, often in areas that we once viewed as quite peripheral to our professions.”
Things like producing and editing videos, teaching online, confronting grief and loss on a global scale, interpreting public health data, the list goes on. Learning new things fast is all too familiar right now.
Yet, even more than this kind of real-world truth there is an underlying assumption laid out in the preface that I continue to mull over:
“… we must reconceive change as part of a grand adventure and be at peace with fluidity, even though it may defy our natural instinct to reach a steady state.”
I shared this sentence at our staff meeting last week and added that I am not to a point where I see massive, recent changes as a grand adventure, not yet anyway. Fluidity doesn’t yet evoke peace. All I can do is try to remember that God is always doing a new thing.
I try to remember that God is always doing a new thing knowing that, in the words of Mary Hinkle Shore: “In holy baptism, Christians confess that we are mystically joined in the death of Christ. The life of the baptized, then, is the practice of exploring the freedom of having, on the one hand, nothing left to lose, and, on the other hand, an eternity of life to give away.” She goes on to write, “Baptism into Christ offers the freedom to live experimenting, failing, repenting, and being forgiven. It is the freedom to begin again and again.”
It is the flowing waters of our baptism that give us the peace that passes understanding in the fluidity of life because we know the unchanging truth that we belong to God. The scale of this truth is beyond our comprehension, amplified by Christ throughout all creation, steady and sure no matter our state or the state of the world.
