I’ve written before about how Dick Street gave me a whole new outlook on ministry, and on life.
It was a couple of months after I had been appointed to the UMC in Orion, IL. Dick and I were having coffee. Dick was a tall, rugged man, a contractor. You didn’t look at him and say, “There’s a thoughtful man.” But you did think, “There’s a guy who won’t blab about his conversations.”
So, I said, “Dick, I just don’t seem to fit in here.”
“That’s why you’re going to do us so much good,” Dick said. “The other preachers we’ve had here fit in too well.”
For the next 45 years of full-time and interim ministry, I worked with the assumption that NOT fitting in was one of my gifts to the congregation. I was a good preacher, a good pastor… and I was good at not fitting in.
Not fitting is a complaint I hear often from old people. In fact, I hear it from myself. “I don’t fit in this present world.” Yes, true. But that doesn’t mean I’m irrelevant, or have nothing to offer. Being a square peg on a board of round holes might make a more interesting picture.
Old folks need to be careful not to assume that we are better because we don’t fit it, that we’re different, because we’re older, because we’ve seen things younger people can only guess at. At the same time, we need to understand that NOT fitting into this present age may be a gift that we can bring to it.
John Robert McFarland
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