Today’s author is Intentional Interim Pastor, Steve Sylvester.
Hindsight is a funny thing. The first thing I forget about a canoe trip is the mosquitoes. And the black flies. On my trip to Hudson Bay many years ago, we spent the first week with swollen wrists and necks because of the black flies. The bites were painful, and after they were painful, they itched. When I remember that part of the trip these days, however, if I remember it at all, I remember it as a detail, maybe an inconvenience, but I don’t remember the sense of dread in those early days when clouds of black flies swarmed around us and there was no escaping them.
Stuck in the wilderness, their hungry bellies gnawing at them, the Israelites shared stories about the halcyon days of their enslavement. “Remember when?” they said to each other. “Remember back in Egypt when we sat around eating stew and warm buttered bread? Remember when the slave masters would let us quit work early so we could all go swimming with them in the Nile?” So, yeah, hindsight is weird. Sometimes when we look back, we don’t remember the difficult things, and at other times we construct a past reality that never even existed.
One of the elements of the interim process is to look back into the history of the congregation. We do this because of the adage that it’s difficult to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are, and you can’t know where you are without knowing where you came from. In a few weeks, on October 19 to be exact, Scott Tunseth and I will be teaming up in the Adult Ed gathering between worship times to help those in attendance look back at the history of Prince of Peace. This will not be an easy thing to do well. There are some difficult things we will want to forget or gloss over. Other things we might remember inaccurately. So, we won’t just be “gathering memories.” We will be talking about those memories, holding them in our hands, turning them about to consider them in their entirety.
When things became difficult in the wilderness, the Israelites wanted to return to the familiar, even the familiarity of enslavement. They wanted to do an about face because of their empty bellies, but I think their response to their hunger had a lot to do with their concern about an uncertain future. Prince of Peace is not in wilderness time to the degree that the Israelites were, but you are certainly in a time when you are cut loose from your past and the future is fuzzy. So, as we look back on October 19, as we think about where we are now, and as we look to the future, we hold onto the same God that Moses helped the Israelites hold onto. And we remember that our faithful God has always seen us through and will continue to do so.