Pressing On

As I approach the fifth anniversary of my relationship with St Marks, I am increasing aware that I feel enormously different about my life and ministry now than I did five years ago.

For one thing, during these five years I’ve reached some clarity about a number of questions I’ve pondered and explored for decades. Most of these questions were about faith, meaning, purpose, and the nature of Christianity, question that I began exploring seriously in college, and continued exploring ever since. And, to tell the truth, enjoyed the sense of accomplishment we all feel as we complete tasks we have been working at for a very long time.

Yet on the other hand, I’ve felt some astonishment as I revisited some of the great Christian writings that I first read long ago. Several books that I read again these past several years had remained unopened since I first read them twenty or thirty years ago. A few of them were yellowed and brittle, and literally fell apart, page by page, as I recently them again. But what astonished me was to discover my own underlining and comments in the margins. The truth is that I have no memory whatsoever of having ever read these books, nor of their having made any real impact on me. Yet in many cases, the passages I underlined or commented upon long ago were often the very things about which I felt I have finally at last achieved some measure of clarity and perspective! It made me wonder whether I had forgotten what I’d once known, or never really understood what I had once thought I had understood.

Or perhaps there is better way to think about this, a way suggested by Jesus in his metaphor of the garden. The work of the spiritual life is so much more than the work of planting seeds where there are no seeds. It includes cultivating the garden while those seeds grow, develop, transform, mature, and finally ripen. The spiritual life is about constant change. We haven’t reached the end when the seed has sprouted, nor when the plant has flowered, nor when the fruit has set on, nor even when it finally ripens. Even then, there is more. As Jesus put it, unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone – but if it dies, it bears much more fruit.

So as I reflect on this season of my life, I feel very different about myself and my ministry than I did five years ago, and can look back on decades of living as a Christian as a time of constant, continuing, change. But rather than feeling as though I have somehow arrived, I realize from Jesus’ metaphor, that the greatest changes lie ahead. As Christians, we can feel great contentment in our lives in Christ – but we never say we have attained our destination. As St Paul put it in Philippians:

One thing I do: forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this same mind.

So thank you so much for these past five years, for all you have taught me, for all you have encouraged me to learn, to do, and to experience. And now, we press on!

Grace and peace,
Rick+