A Year Later

It started with a phone call.  It came in the middle of the morning.  You are going about your business, pushing full steam ahead, making plans and making connections all in hopes of making a difference.  Then the phone rings and in the matters of just a few minutes it all changes.

I am a United Methodist pastor, which means I itinerate.   I go where I am sent.  I don’t get interviewed or selected.  I do not apply or send a resume.  I don’t get to pick or choose. I go.  Go when, and where, I am sent.

That is the peculiarity of our system – when called – we go.   That fate-full call marks a moment in time for a church and their pastor.  A moment to look back.  A moment to look ahead.   A moment to see how far you have come.  A moment to dream about how far you might go.

Last year I got that call.  After seven years in a place we had grown to love, among a people who had grown to love us, it was time to go.  It marked an important moment in our life.  We had our two babies at that church.  We had lost a baby at that church.  We got our legs under us at that church.  We experienced miracles there - suffered defeats there. We came to understand ourselves more fully as pastors and people and partners and parents there.

In short, we came of age there – and then it was time to go.

  

Itinerancy means trust.  

Trusting that there is something larger at play.  Trusting that the common good can still bring about things that will be  uncommonly good.  It means trusting that what you experienced in one place will meet you in the next place.

It was a year ago today that we moved.  

This is how I remember it:

On the day Michael Jackson died, we loaded everything we owned into moving truck and let four men transition our lives in boxes filled with more than just our stuff.  

They shifted our seasons without ever noticing that each load seemed a bit heavier than the last.

 

It was somewhere between the sofa and the plates for the kitchen that one of them mentioned he died.  But with the radio still buried somewhere deep underneath, television not yet connect to cable, internet disconnected, there was no way to know for sure – just left to imagine the candlelit cardboard lining the fences to Neverland.

But later ,when stacks of corrugated containers covered every inch of free space in a house that did not yet know our stories, I found it – the shoebox -that used to contain the red and black hightop sneakers that cost me an entire summer of newspaper delivers. And there it was.  The cassette tape: 

 

Recorded in the 4^th grade.  The case long gone.  The writing worn thin.  But when rewound – the beats of “Beat It” filled that basement with more than just sound.

And I let it play...

until it was silent...

like our new home...

like my childhood memories...

silent

like the music

 August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009