Dear Friends,
I am sure I have shared the prayer below by Bishop Ken Untener before – probably even this year. But I always come back to it at graduation and other milestones that send youth on to the next chapter of their lives. Have I done enough? Have we prepared them? After a year of pandemic living, I find myself asking these questions on a broader scale. Were we enough this year? It reminds me that the answer is yes. Because we cannot do everything for our young people. But we have done something. And our something, in God’s hands, is everything.
Thank you for all the little somethings you do, that add up to a big something in the life and faith journey of our young people!
Together in Christ,
Catherine Anderson
Synod Minister for Discipleship and Christian Community
A Future Not Our Own
It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.
This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.
