Pastor Angie's In-Spire-ations April 2019
Last month, I asked you to reflect on three questions during Lent:
What will you do…learn…or become in the liminal space between now and July?
What will you let go of so that your hands are free to embrace something new?
What can we do together that will make us even stronger when our new pastor arrives?
It has been a challenging month for many of us personally, professionally and as a church family coming to terms with Chris moving and a new pastor coming…and then NOT coming. The word “mulligan” just might be our buzz word for a little while!
I’m not generally a Wikipedia fan, but I looked up the word mulligan and this is what it said, “A mulligan is a second chance to perform an action, usually after the first chance went wrong through bad luck or a blunder. Its best-known meaning is in golf, whereby a player is informally allowed to replay a stroke, even though this is against the formal rules of golf.”
When I think of mulligan, I remember the story of mulligan stew when I was a kid. That recipe includes throwing odds and ends of food into a pot and making stew. I can embrace both meanings when I cook. Let’s just say a second chance at mulligan stew gone bad is probably a good option and that would be why Chris does the cooking in our home!
We don’t always know why uncommon things happen…like going through the appointment process a second time. We know why the decision was made and we know the conference stepped up and came to us honestly calling the mulligan. The concern I heard that day relates to trusting whether the next decision will be right. I remembered my devotional and an entry about asking why and trusting.
“My ways are mysterious and unpredictable, but they are good. Don’t get trapped in a posture of demanding to know ‘Why?’ That is the wrong question to ask Me. The right questions are: ‘How do you want me to view this situation?’ and ‘What do you want me to do right now?’ You cannot change the past, so start with the present moment and seek to find My way forward. Trust Me one day, one moment at a time.” (Sarah Young~ Jesus Always: Embracing Joy in His Presence)
A mulligan is a second chance. Our conference leaders are praying and trusting God to help them find their way forward with a second chance to bring us a pastor that will be the right person to guide us. Every church is a little like mulligan stew with odds and ends of people thrown into one pot we call our church family and it can’t be easy to find a person to step in and be the sous-chef (the second in command in a kitchen) to our MASTER CHEF (God) who will help us nourish our community.
There are a lot of questions to think about as we approach Easter. Come to think of it…Easter is a foreshadowing of our own mulligans. As hard as we try, we are not always going to get things right the first time around, but Jesus is about to rise again as living proof that we can trust God to guide our second chances. Keep learning…keep letting go…keep moving forward…KEEP TRUSTING. Mulligan stew anyone?
Pastor Angie