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I Was Just Thinking . . .
The District Conference is long gone. Gathering V is history. Christmas has passed and all the stars and shepherds and Magi are taken down. Even New Year’s Eve is a memory, and now the New Year is waiting to be lived. Some of the most poignant phrases of the Christmas story are: “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen . . .” (Luke 2:20a NRSV); “. . .they left for their own country by a different road.” (Matt. 2:12b NRSV).
Every big event, every special day on the calendar is followed by the ordinary days when there is just plain hard work to be done. The sheep still had to be fed and protected. The Magi had to make their weary way back over the desert, back to their star charts. Joseph and Mary had to pick up and move, making sure the infant Christ had enough swaddling clothes and was soothed when he cried, and they were deadly tired, heading to an unknown land.
Howard Thurman, the great poet and friend of Martin Luther King, has captured this sense in his poem: “When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks.
The work of Christmas begins.”
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To teach the nations,
To bring Christ to all,
To make music in the heart.
We have been working at transformation for some time, now. And that is just as it should and will be! We have seen the star. We have worshipped the infant Jesus at the manger. We have caught glimpses of transformation in the stories of churches throughout the district. We have shared love and joy and renewal at District Conferences and Gatherings. We hold and treasure these in our hearts as we return to our home churches, glorifying and praising God. And then, we are met by the everyday, the human foibles, the difficult, unglamorous, routine, sometimes even unpleasant work that must be done in the body of Christ, the work that takes time and asks of us the challenge to keep the vision alive.
As I take on this new challenge of being the District Executive Minister, I know that the work which was so ably started will ask of us to continue. We must do the hard, challenging, unglamorous work of Christmas, the work of transformation which, I have discovered, takes time and is never done. We are called to find the joy and privilege in the work itself, to keep alive the images, the memories that keep our vision a heart reality. There will be star moments; there will be transformed times, but I ask of you to join me in all the moments—high and holy, tired and difficult, and in between. Please let us hold up one another by prayer and thanksgiving in doing the work of Christmas, the work of transformation!
----Sonja Griffith
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