Sixth Monday in Easter
Those of you who are familiar with Celtic Christianity know the term "thin places." Our invisible, intangible God can seem distant to many--God's in God's heaven, and we're here on earth. For Celtic Christians the thin places are those areas and events in our lives where the distance between heaven and earth becomes very thin, where God makes the Divine invisible presence known in completely tangible ways.
A popular term among American Christians during the last decade or two is "God thing." God things seem to me to be very close to thin places. A God thing is when something happens, usually not something hugely big, which is more easily and reasonably explained as something God did than as something of mere coincidence.
My ex-wife, Marti, and I separated amicably on March 1, 1976. I was in Triune, Tennessee. She and our infant daughter April moved back to Durham. My intention was to seek an appointment in the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church and move back to somewhere in the eastern half of the state. I would be leaving my church in Triune and moving to NC in June. During the intervening three months I made numerous trips, one every two or three weeks to Durham to see April. I would leave Wednesday night after Prayer Meeting and drive all night long, about 10 hours (55 mph speed limit in those days) and stay up the next day seeing April and old friends at Duke. I brought a sleeping bag and usually found the floor of a friends dorm room to sleep on Thursday and Friday nights. I would drive back Saturday morning, arriving late Saturday night to preach the next morning. On those weeks I would cram as much parish work into Sunday through Wednesday as I could.
My bishop in the Tennessee Conference, Bishop Ellis Finger, was a great man who helped me in this process far beyond the call of his duty to a young and inexperienced minister, who wanted to leave his conference. Little did either of us know that several years later he would again be my bishop in neither the Tennessee nor the North Carolina Conference.
On one of my trips back to Durham I had an appointment with the Bishop of the North Carolina Conference, Bishop Robert Blackburn, to talk about the possibility of an church appointment and of my eventually joining the NC Conference. Bishop Blackburn made it clear that he had no obligation to me. Furthermore he didn't like the idea of divorced pastors. Furthermore, he didn't think that I, a Ph.D. candidate city boy, would be at well suited to small town and rural churches that constituted most of the NC Conference, where most of my members would have only high school education, if that. I did remind him that I had spent the last two years serving just us a church. He said with no enthusiasm, "I'll see what I can do."
A couple of weeks later he called me and told me he had a two point charge (being pastor of two churches) available in Kinston. Would I take it? I said yes. What a relief. I'd never been to Kinston but saw on a map that it was only a couple of hours drive to Durham, a far better situation than Triune. I thank both the bishop and God that I would have this opportunity. I would have a parsonage there and be able to move in at the end of June. Between the end of my appointment in Triune and the beginning of my appointment in Kinston, I made arrangements to sleep on the floor of the basement of Blacknall Presbyterian in Durham. It did have a bathroom and shower.
God had blessed me and I was grateful. That could have been the end of the story. But then I got another call from the bishop, five days before annual conference. This was my God thing. The Bishop said there had just been an unexpected last minute change in the Sanford District. A three point charge had just opened up in the Sanford District, three small churches at the northern end of Chatham county, about eight miles south of Chapel Hill. I enthusiastically accepted the offer. As far as I was concerned, it would be like living in Chapel Hill, a place I loved. It would be 20 miles from April, instead of two hours, or ten hours. I felt that God had blessed me when I got the appointment in Kinston--but this was going way, way beyond that blessing. This was far more than I could have hoped for. This was a God thing.
Faithfully,
Christian
2 comments:
I love Christian's story of God Moments and coming "home". Speaking of "thin places", the opportunity to come to Chapel Hill for Caroline, our small children, Beth and Robbie and me came suddenly when UNC needed a chemical oceanographer because of a faculty member's surprise retirement. We had been living near New Haven, CT, on an $8500/yr post-doc stipend and needed to get our young children settled before they started kindergarden (we also needed a “real job”, as Caroline's mother gently put it).
We had searched between Georgia and Virginia for over a year, trying to locate close to Mars Hill, where my parents lived, and had come to envision Chapel Hill as the closest thing to Heaven imaginable. On a balmy, 75 degree January day, I first stepped foot on campus. It was undoubtedly snowing in New Haven, more likely freezing raining; however, I was told by the faculty recruiter that Chapel Hill weather was always like this (and I did not question his deftly offered alternative fact).
The "God Moment" flooded over and through me as I walked along the warm South Road sidewalk next to the Bell Tower and the old "Tin Can" indoor track "facility"... I said to myself "If I'm lucky enough to get this position we'll never leave..." , that was January 1974 and we moved ourselves and everything we owned, including undergraduate debt, to Chapel Hill six months later. I know exactly what Christian is talking about.
We've never left...(okay, kids grew up and did actually leave although one keeps trying to get back; apparently the other one can tolerate freezing rain).
Awwww... ten hour drive! I'm glad they have planes now... if we can get on them again! Miss you!!!
Post a Comment