| | A Long and Winding Road
Last January I went to Birmingham, AL for the Winter Meeting of the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). When I left I was on "cloud nine" because I thought I finally found a people with whom I shared a heart for mission and ministry. I thought I found a home! As I left for the six-hour drive back to my home near Lexington, KY I was so happy and so full of excitment. In fact, I was so stoked that I actually turned on the wrong parkway...and I didn't even realize it for nearly an hour! Fortunately I was going the right direction so I checked the map, made a correction, and my mistake only cost me about half an hour or so. But as I was driving I had a sudden unsettled feeling: Could this be a metaphor, a message from the Lord? Could it be that I was on the "wrong road" vocationally and ecclesiastically? I comforted myself by saying, "No, you knucklehead, you just made a wrong turn, don't make it to be more than it is." But deep down I knew - I don't know how I knew, I just did - that that ride home, and taking the wrong parkway, was more than a simple navigational mistake, it had a meaning.
Lately my thoughts have gone back to last January and that ride home. It occured to me that I hadn't taken the "wrong road," I had taken the longer way. Today I am working as a college professor and attending an AMiA congregation (one of only two in Ohio!). I did not plant a church in my first year out of my doctoral program, like I thought. But perhaps it was the Lord's way of telling me that the time (and place) just wasn't right. It doesn't mean the sense of home I felt in the AMiA was way off. Rather it meant (or might have meant, if it meant anything!) that what was in my heart was right, but the specifics were not as I thought. What do you think?
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| | Posted 12/25/2006 11:08 PM - 36 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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