Advent Presence: Kissed by the Past, Beckoned by the Future by Melford "Bud" Holland

Author:Melford "Bud" Holland [Holland, Melford "Bud"]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Reflect

1. What is it like to be dismissed people?

2. What gives you a sense that you may be a bearer of good news, hope, and promise? What do you need to make this work?

3. How should we proceed (to be a dismissed people)? How will we know we are proceeding?

DAY 13

Reengaging Contexts

One of the most exhilarating yet humbling journeys we might take is to go to a high school reunion. I have been to several over the years. At a fortieth-year reunion we gathered for pictures on an outdoor deck of the meeting place—just next to the Kanawha River in West Virginia. Two of the members of our class looked like they had just gotten off the bus from school. They looked so young and robust. When I received a copy of the group photo, it seemed like all the rest of us were leaning away from them. There they were, on one side of the picture with the rest of us on the other. Does this reflect how reticent we might be to reenter a context? For we don’t know what we will find there. Perhaps even our old selves will be in the new picture.

Reunions have interesting conversations of shared stories and memories: missed tackles on the football field, teachers who were dear to our memory and those who were not, the car crashes we were involved in, and a whole host of other remembered events. All of that is wonderful and predictable. But what about people’s lives now? What have our lives been about since high school and what is it that we want to do now? We don’t allow enough time to get to those questions. We can be stuck in the past and look at the other as those they once were: the eighteen-year-old friend. They are now much older, like us, and have so much more to tell about themselves.

One of the most difficult places we can be in life is to prejudge people based on past data. In John 1:46 we read how Jesus was prejudged by just being the son of Joseph and Mary, having come from Nazareth. In my childhood we prejudged people who lived down the valley, up the hollows, any other place that was different from the narrow slice of geography where we lived. We didn’t like some others because they didn’t like us—we were rivals on the football fields and basketball courts of our living. Yet as we grow older, how might we entertain letting go of that kind of bigotry and prejudice?

One of the powerful forces in our lives is that of default. It is that position to which we return, as it defines for us a point in time where we feel more secure about who we are and the world around us. It matters less if the default is working well for us, but it does matter a lot if we remain stuck there. A default position held in high school should certainly be reexamined as we age.

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