YOU ARE THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR 6-28-17

YOU ARE THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR  6-28-17

Over the last 20 years or so of my career, I was often asked to speak to groups of pastors, especially new pastors. What I said boiled down to this: If you want the church to be the church, you have to do it yourself. There will be some who will help, and some who will oppose, but you have to go ahead and do church and be church. It’s up to you.

Someone has said, “God loved us so much that he did not send a committee.”

I know that no one of us is the Body of Christ alone. That takes all of us. But if you wait in the church for administrators or boards or committees or conferences to take action, you’re going to wait a long time.

Each of us is called to use our particular gifts and graces as part of the Body of Christ. No one else has the gifts and graces to be you.

Look at those in the church who got things done: Paul, Francis, Luther, Wesley, King. They didn’t wait for the church’s approval. Indeed, usually the church did not approve of them. But they just went ahead and did what had to be done. They weren’t really trying to lead or to start a movement. They just did what they saw needed to be done.

It seems to me that this is true in personal life as well as the church. If I want to be the real me, I just have to go ahead and do it. If I wait until the time is right, until I have things in order, until I have more energy, until people aren’t expecting one thing or another from me, until I have more money, until… I’m never going to be me.

There is a great line about Jesus in one of Jim Manley’s songs: “He must be a mad man, or publicity seeker, or what we’ve all been waiting for…”

Christ frees us from ourselves to be ourselves. In terms of being me, I’m the one I’ve been waiting for.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com