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Saturday, October 29, 2011

The Unknown

Note--this was supposed to be published Thursday.  The reason it wasn't is that I forgot to schedule it before I left for Storm Mountain camp on Tuesday.  I decided to publish it anyway because, well, I went to the trouble of writing it, and it's my blog.

            By the time you read this, I should have a pretty good idea about whether I’ll be ordained in June or not.  Yesterday, I met with the Board of Ordained Ministry, which then voted as to whether to recommend me for ordination.  If they said yes there will still be more things I have to do, but barring unforeseen circumstances, their approval will mean that I will be ordained in June.
            The meeting yesterday was at Storm Mountain camp, and was/will be followed by three days of training meetings with others who, like me, are probationary elders.  This means they have been commissioned as pastors, but have not yet been ordained.  The Dakotas Conference requires at least three years between commissioning and ordination.  For me, those three years will be done in June.
            The thing is that, since I did not know whether I’d have time to write anything at Storm Mountain, I’m writing this before I leave.  As I write this, I don’t know whether I was approved at yesterday’s meeting or not, because that yesterday hasn’t happened yet.
            I have no reason to think I won’t be approved.  It would seem like, if the board had doubts about my fitness for ordination, I would have heard about them by now.  Still, I was a lawyer long enough to know that nothing is final until the papers are all signed and filed.
            Because of that, as I write this, I’m a little nervous about the meeting.  I have nothing in my experience to compare it to.  I went through a somewhat similar process when I was commissioned, but it was not this extensive.  I went through a lot of things as a lawyer, too, but nothing really like this.  As a lawyer, I could study and do research and be prepared.  Here, there’s nothing to really prepare.  I’m going into an unknown situation.
            That’s the main thing that always scares us, isn’t it?  The unknown.  That’s why what we’re really scared of, sometimes, is the future.  We’re not scared about the past, because the past is over and done with.  We’re scared about the future.  We’re scared about what’s going to happen, because it’s unknown.  We don’t know what’s going to happen in the years to come.  Sometimes, we don’t know what’s going to come in the next few months.  Sometimes, we don’t even know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes.
            When you think about it, that’s why death scares us:  it’s an unknown.  Even as Christians, death can be scary.  We say we believe in eternal life, and we say we believe we’re going to heaven, but what does that mean, really?  Can a human ever actually grasp the concept of eternity?  Can we even picture heaven with any feeling of accuracy?  We can’t.  That’s why death can be really scary to us, even when we believe in Christ.
            Death is not a complete unknown, though.  We know a few things.  We know that, whatever death holds, Jesus already went through it.  Not only did he go through it, he conquered it.  He did not just conquer it for himself, he conquered it for us, too.  Jesus told us he was going to prepare a place for us, and that when the time was right, he would come and take us to him.  So we know, whatever death holds, it will take us to the Son, and the Son, in turn, will take us to the Father.  That means that, whatever death holds, it must ultimately be good.
            There’s one other thing about unknowns, too.  For God, they don’t exist.  There is no such thing as an unknown to God, because God exists outside of time.  Lots of things are unknown to us.  Nothing is unknown to God.
            Because of that, we don’t need to fear the unknown.  Whatever the future holds, God is already in it, and God has already worked everything out for the good.  That does not mean we won’t ever have hard times; we almost certainly will.  Still, we know that, even in those hard times, God is in control, and God always wins in the end.
            By the time you read this, I’ll know whether I’ve been approved for ordination.  As I’m writing it, though, God already knows.  That’s pretty comforting.

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