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From Rev. Brock Patterson
"T-Day Plus One"
Well, it’s done. Not much I can do about it now. Even if I could build a time machine and go back one year, I’m not sure that I could (or would) change all that much. About the best I can do is take plenty of notes, learning from successes, failures, and the yet undefined. Tax-day arrives every year and I’m almost always caught by surprise. One would think I’d be better at this, but alas, I’m not. Pooh.
Each year, following the “High-Holy Days” in Church (Christmas and Easter), we should be taking lots of notes in the Church. What worked? What didn’t work? Where did we exhaust ourselves and what caught us by surprise? Though we may not be able to repeat every success or avoid every failure, experience can often teach us some valuable lessons for next year.
Experience and past performance can help immensely in life, but history is no guarantee of the future. For those of us who’ve circled the block a few times, we’ve learned some hard lessons that we are determined to not repeat. We’ve also discovered some good things that we would love to live in again, if possible. The catch, of course, is that no matter how much history and experience we have, we can’t take advantage of every opportunity or avoid every pothole. Even the best weather forecasters miss and the worst stock-pickers get lucky
sometimes.
Even people with the most knowledge and best experience make mistakes. That’s just life. The difference, of course, is where and when we add God to our equation. The High-Holy Days teach us that we’re supposed to automatically include God in all of our thoughts and actions. Every other day in the year, however, includes so many distractions and situations that it’s nearly impossible to think about God as often as we should, let alone include God in all our decisions.
During these next few weeks, Easter 2024 will fall into a distant box of memories that already includes Christmas 2023. Our focus will be on the days ahead. We are about to be consumed with all manner of real-life experiences like graduations, birthdays, vacations, and projects. God is already present in each of those days ahead, but we will still be faced with choices that are beyond our best skills and experience. It’s during these choices that God will be most valuable to us because it indicates that even in our best human condition, we still need God to lead us to the correct decisions and best actions.
It’s Tax-Day Plus One. It’s a couple of weeks after Easter and just a little while since our last big life event. What did we learn? Where should we improve? Though we can’t learn everything and we’ll never know enough, keeping God first will give us the best chance of success in every situation. It may seem like an easy answer to life’s questions but that’s precisely the point. We don’t have to live a perfect life next year in the days ahead. We simply need to give our best to the LORD as often as we can.
God Bless,
Brock
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