THE LAST REUNION, PART II: DISAPPOINTMENT [W, 1-13-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

[Seeing in our hometown newspaper the obituary of Paula, my classmate from fifth grade through high school, reminded me of the last time I saw her, at our 60-year class reunion, and all the confusion our last conversation produced. Reflecting on it took far too many words for one column, so here is the second in a four-part series]. {Through the years, I have told young preachers: “NEVER start a sermon by saying this is one of a series, and telling which # it is.” People are bored before you really start preaching. It’s a good thing this isn’t a sermon.}

THE LAST REUNION, PART II: DISAPPOINTMENT   [W, 1-13-21]

I’ve rarely been disappointed by my friends, mostly, I’m sure, because they were good people who tried to be good friends. No reason for disappointment. But also my disappointment possibilities have been reduced because I loved stories, and I tried to hear a person’s story before I assumed anything about them. The hearing of the story was more important to me than making judgments about it.

Nobody gets through life without disappointments in others, though. I wrote in this column some time back about the man with whom I had been close friends when we were in graduate school, both in our mid-30s at that time. 20 years later, when I had cancer and had been told I would be dead “in a year or two,” he was hired as pastor at a church near where we lived. I went to see him, told him about my plight. He wasn’t really interested, spent almost all our time together talking about his problems with the president of his new congregation. That was disappointing.

Nadia Bolz Weber, the tattooed profane Lutheran pastor who started a congregation in Denver that takes in all the folks that other exclude, says that she tells people as they become a part of that congregation, “Sooner or later, you will be disappointed here. We won’t be what you expect us to be or what you want us to be. That’s the nature of life and the church. Don’t even join if you’re not willing to work it through when you’re disappointed.”

I’ve tried to deal with life that way when I’ve been disappointed. It’s my responsibility to adjust my assumptions. It’s my responsibility to forgive the one who disappointed me, and to forgive myself for having put that person into a box of my assumptions. I’ve tried to do that with Paula. I assumed she was someone other than who she was. My assumptions about her are not her responsibility.

Also, I worry about her assumptions of me. Did she think I was a person who, in those circumstances, yet, going out the door of our last class reunion, would enjoy hearing about her disgust with a black president or with welfare recipients? Did I disappoint her, too? If so, I’m glad I did.

John Robert McFarland