MONDAY MUSINGS

January 2, 2008

Happy New Year!

Yesterday, New Year’s Day, I looked through all the Christmas cards we had received this past year.  Some I had just skimmed when they first arrived, especially the longer epistles from people we hear from only once a year.  In the haste of the season I had noted their arrival but had not digested the content.

St. John’s UCC is the fifth congregation I have served in my ministry, along with the twelve years on the staff of the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference.  In those six settings for ministry we have been touched by many, many others who have enriched us in countless ways.  The Christmas cards were from people in all of those places, reminding me of connections and relationships and events that have shaped me into the person I am today.  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to these folk who graced those congregations and blessed my ministry.

I marvel at the ways in which our lives are stitched together, families, communities, congregations, and friendships.  Andrew Young, a minister of the United Church of Christ as well as a civic leader, was once asked about coincidences in our lives and their meanings.  He responded by saying, “Coincidences are those occasions in which God chooses to remain anonymous.”  I have always liked that response and I have shared it with others on many occasions.

How much of our lives is totally random, a series of unrelated, haphazard, devoid-of-meaning events, and how much of our lives contains a thread of meaning and intentionality that we scarcely understand, something even divine?  How mindful should we be of these people who are about us, touching, bumping, rubbing, blessing us, some in a once-in-a-lifetime encounter and some in life-long relationships?  Do we regularly miss the significance of these encounters and thereby miss the opportunity to have our lives touched and changed?

Each of those Christmas cards represents something of my life and the life of my family.  Most of those people were present in congregations I felt called to serve, and they helped shape what God was able to accomplish through us.  Each card prompted a memory and a longing to recapture a time that is now past. 

So the New Year of 2008 is upon us with the corresponding opportunities for new relationships and the creation of new memories.  “Make new friends, but keep the old.  One is silver and the other gold.”  May that old camp song serve to guide our living in this new slice of God’s eternity.  Peace.  John Krueger