Welcome to Valley United Methodist Church!
September 2010
I stopped to pick up the newspaper and a cup of coffee this morning. I was expecting nothing more than a polite good morning exchange between myself and the clerk. Something like: “what a great day, can you believe this rain, feels like a storm coming, etc.” Nothing earth-shattering, nothing special we might say in exchanging pleasantries.
However, an exchange that I was not a part of in a direct sense, was when I “overheard” this:
"Is everyone who drives on I-235 crazy or something? I can’t believe these people! Don’t they know how to use turn signals? Don’t they ever look before they change lanes?”
Now this man was clearly agitated. A visitor to the greater Des Moines Metro area. Boy did we leave an impression with him. Not good, but an impression nevertheless.
As I went out one door he went out another, I saw him get on a big motorcycle with Kansas plates. As he drove off I was hoping and praying his day was going to get better and he might find some people who put their turn signal on before they changed lanes. Wouldn’t that be great?!
Truth is there are far too many who go this way and that way in life and never seem to think about “us”, when changing lanes. May God bless them and “us” as we move together in this world. A world where changing lanes is inevitable.
This got me to thinking. How many lane changes have I seen lately? Far too many to speak to. However, what I can speak to are the feelings that arise when I change lanes. For me they are a roller coaster if you will of feelings pulling and pushing.
Paula Ripple had this to say, which speaks well to how I have felt recently:
Both my hands shaped this pot. And, the place where it actually forms is a place of tension between the pressure applied from the outside and the pressure of the hand on the inside. That’s the way my life has been. Sadness and death and misfortune and the love of friends and all things that happened to me that I didn’t even choose. All of that influenced my life. But, there are things I believe in about myself, my faith in God and the love of some friends that worked on the insides of me. My life, like this pot, is the result of what happened on the outside and what was going on inside of me.
Life, like this pot, comes to be when in places of tension. Life comes to be when we learn how to avoid looking for answers and finally learn how to ask the questions that will bring us to life. There is a tendency in us to want to live tension-free. But, like the woman potter, I believe that this tension is God’s gift to us, a gift that sometimes will not permit us to escape its presence. I believe that our creative energies are activated by just that kind of upsetting tension. It is in responding to this gnawing discomfort that we have the possibility of giving shape to dreams that are at once faithful to who we are and who we can become.
Shalom,
Ken