Fall weather. It stirs memories of schooldays, cider mills and football games, packing things up for the summer and getting ready for winter. Hard to believe it was only a year ago our congregation made the move from the Steel House Tavern to the little chapel we're at now in Bloomfield Hills.
This life is filled with change, and we often marvel at how different the place we find ourselves is from the place we came from. That can be a sad feeling or a happy feeling, but it is always a feeling mingled with an awareness of the transience of life, and how what one day seemed solid ground can prove sinking sand the next.
The saints of old had this experience, Abram had it when he found himself a stranger in a strange land. Moses had it when he stood on the heights of Nebo and gazed down upon the land of promise. A sweet sadness. Sad because we are longing for a place to call home, and sweet because through the eyes of faith we are just able to catch a fleeting glimpse of it from afar.
is it an illusion?
Psalm 90, a psalm inspired by Moses, says: O Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. It's a powerful psalm. In the midst of all of life's changes, the painful partings with the people and places that have been a precious resting place for us in the past,m yet for us there is only one eternal home - God himself. Our destiny is not a place but a person, and where he goes we will follow.
there is strength in weakness when it compels us to lean on God alone
New Temple has given all of us a chance to share in that most precious experience of the saints, the experience of being a part of something small in the eyes of the world, but of great worth in the eyes of God. A congregation like ours has very little to boast of, but there is strength in weakness when it compels us to lean on God alone, wisdom that is blinding in it's simplicity, and a tender joy such as people are privileged to experience only a few times in their life. When all you have is Jesus, you are richer than the richest king.
As we enter this next year, we will doubtless look for new ways to build and grow, but let us never forget those hot summer days without air conditioning, when children crawled about the pulpit during sermon time, or when we lifted high the immortal name in the back of a converted pub: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown (Jer. 2:1)
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