a need for contemplation
by Greg Alexander, Acting General Minister,
CCK
It seems that as you get older you get
more reflective. at least that is my experience. I seem to do a lot of that
these days. This year’s General Assembly has brought a need for
contemplation out in me in a big way.
This
is the first time I have really noticed how the lines and signs of aging are
taking their toll on my contemporaries in ministry. More gray hair. More
furrowed brows. A little slower pace as we stroll rather than stride across the
convention center floors. The talk of grandchildren has now entered our
conversations. The youth I once knew are adults with churches of their own,
children of their own, and grown-up issues of their own. While I see the lines
and signs in my own face each morning and feel the aches and pains of aging in
my body each day, I have learned to look past what is obvious to all others.
Yet, here, in this gathering, the reminders come with each hug and handshake of
treasured friends.
I can honestly say
that beyond the initial shock value of these encounters, I am really at peace
with the implications of the realities of aging. I know there is so much more. I
was reminded of that this morning in my friend, Barbara Blaisdell’s
“testimony” given to those gathered for the Minister’s
Breakfast hosted by the Pension Fund. You see, the very fact that Barbara would
call her address a “testimony” is proof enough. When we were in
seminary together testimonies were disregarded as nothing more than the shallow
faith statements of the unenlightened. This morning, through Barbara, we heard
what happens when a brilliant mind, a deep spiritual river, informed faith, the
scholarly embrace of scripture and the life-threatening trials of life, embrace.
You get the wisdom, majesty and mystery of God in humble human form, wonderfully
articulated! You see, when someone like Barbara (a major player in my own faith
development) makes a testimony it sets the rest of us free to make our own. She
speaks what is in our own hearts and paves the way (at least for those of us
with the good sense to walk this way) for us to explore those yearnings,
inklings, and notions we have shied away from trusting in our own lives because
our own arrogant enlightenment has been in the
way.
I like wisdom and I am growing to
like testimony, at least as it comes through these precious aging vessels I call
treasured colleagues and friends.
Filed Thu - July 28, 2005, 01:57 PM in
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