Surprised and Full of Questions

By Megan Crosby
​
Pastor Sonja shared a poem with us at a worship meeting this last Tuesday and I want to share it with you.

“Fortunate are the poor in spirit.”

That means:
Fortunate are those who are willing
to let themselves be censured by the word of God,
to re-examine their views.
to believe they haven’t yet understood a thing,
to be taken by surprise,
to have their mind changed,
to see their convictions,
their principles,
their tidy systems,
and everything they took for granted
swept out from under them,
and to face the fact, once for all,
that there’s no such thing as a matter of course
and that God can ask anything.

Louis Evely
 
Last weekend I went sledding with my four-year-old, Sophia. We had gone down the hill in the same sled, and I had just stood up when my feet were taken out beneath me by another person sledding down the hill. It was a classic cartoon moment. I landed hard on my right side, hearing my back crack all the way up my spine. I felt pain in my wrist and elbow and the wind had been knocked out of me. I got up and decided I hadn’t broken any bones and that I no longer needed a trip to the chiropractor. 
 
Surprised and dazed. That’s how I felt in the sledding accident. It’s also how I’ve felt for a good chunk of the pandemic and the resurgence of Covid with the omicron variant. My work, my life, everything got upended and some things were out right taken away. However, the pandemic also gave me (and many people) time to re-examine my life and think, “Who am I now? How do I really want to live? What is really important to me? What needs to change?” These same questions are also useful for communities and congregations. Our church and the community in which we live is undergoing numerous transitions besides the most obvious pastoral transition at Christ the King. God is inviting us to ponder these questions, to be open to ideas we may not have even considered before. It’s going to be a journey, but we won’t be on the path alone. God is still there, especially when we don’t feel the ground beneath our feet.