By The Rev. Dr. Carl Grosse
Thank you for the 1-year anniversary moment (and flowers!) during the announcements October 13. Since we arrived for your centennial last year, Denise and I have experienced a steady flow of warmth and kindness from you all. We’re grateful to serve God alongside you. Our dear friends from Minnesota told us after church that the Carl & Denise now compared to the Carl & Denise of 10 or 15 years ago is powerful evidence of God at work. They were with us during some rough patches. Listening to your feedback on our ministry and sharing in worship blessed them as it did Denise and me.
It’s one thing to go through hard times. I can’t say mine were as hard as what so many are going through, especially those who lost everything due to Hurricane Helene. Mine were a different kind of hard times. Some were unavoidable, like the deaths of Denise’s parents and my mother. Work challenges and relationship wrinkles had more “free will” involved. Avoidable or not, I’d prefer not to go through them, which is another way of saying “Lead us not into temptation”. Who wants to go through trials in life?
Where we go from the hard times is another thing. What kind of people do we become? Apparently, I am a slow learner and I wonder if God kept me in situations longer than I wanted because it took a while for me to catch on. All I can tell you is that those rough patches help shape what I preach and teach, both verbally and otherwise. If I only hear the Shepherd’s voice in the green pastures and still waters but not in the dark, shadowy valleys, then who am I really following?
You’ve been through a rough time as a congregation: losing great leaders like Dr. Collier, suffering through COVID, seeing fewer young people and aging yourselves, politics and culture ravaging relationships and putting us on edge, staff transitions. Some of that is out of your control, some of it has more “free will” to it. So, what kind of church will you become because of the hard times? How will it shape the way you treat each other, engage the neighborhood, allocate your resources, help people find God here? Maybe Jesus put us together for some hope after a hard time. It’s a good thing if we become more credible witnesses to and better practitioners of God’s love because of what we’ve been through.