Transitions and Layovers

For as long as I can remember, going to church on Sunday has been a part of my life.  For thirty-four of my (almost) fifty years, I have been in ministry of some kind, so “church”, for me, has involved a lot more than Sunday.  There is not much in church life I haven’t seen or experienced.  

I did, however, have a new experience this past Sunday.  I was a part of the final service of a church that had decided to disband.  Because it is a congregation I have worked with for the past three years in my current ministry, I was there to support and encourage them as they met for the final service.

Bittersweet would be a good word to describe the day. These dear saints, almost all in their seventies and eighties, laughed and sang and loved each other.  Their pastor recently celebrated his sixtieth year in pastoral ministry. Did you get that?  Six, Zero!  When he told the congregation that I had been an adviser to him, I had to laugh.  How could I possible presume to advise a man who has been a pastor a decade longer than I have even been alive?  I hope that what I have been is a friend with a listening ear.  I know that I consider him to be my friend.

Including lunch, Mrs. Sweetie and I spent about three hours with these folks, encouraging and being encouraged.  As so often happens when I begin to reflect on particular experiences, my mind goes to the bigger picture of life.  I shared some of these reflections with this congregation on Sunday.  Some have continued to unfold for me since then.

I don’t know of anyone who really likes the idea of being in transition. Regardless of whether a transition was initiated by our choice or someone else’s, it can be an unsettling time in life.  When our ministry headquarters burned last year and one of our churches offered us the use of office space, we decided to call it “transitional” instead of “temporary”.  It made it sound like there was a plan in place, even though we did not have a clue what the plan was! 

There is something in us that longs to be settled and secure.  Even the folks who seem to be constantly on the move would probably admit that their restlessness stems from a sense that they just haven’t found the right place … yet.

Maybe that’s part of our problem.  Because there is that longing in us for a sense of being settled or of having arrived, there is that underlying sense of frustration at the transitional nature of life.

What if we saw life as a series of layovers, rather than a destination?  In the past three years, I have visited several cities for the first time—Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Charlotte.  With each of those, the sum total of my experience is the airport.  All of them were layovers on the way to somewhere else.  These layovers have ranged from twenty minutes to four hours, so there was some variety to what I was able to experience.  But they were still layovers.

I pastored a church in the same community for seventeen years, but now I can see that it was a layover.  We have lived in our current home for twenty years and have no plans to move, but it is a layover.  I have appreciated anew the wisdom of the old southern gospel song that says, “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through.”  In John 14:2-3, Jesus said, “I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

Until we see face to face the One for whom our transitional lives matter, we will not be at the destination. I’m glad my reservations are made at His place.