Piloting Faith: We've been waiting for you

A Word for the Day...

This week I heard a beautiful story from my colleague Marraine Kettell about her experience hiking the Camino in Spain with her father a few years ago. To complete this walk, you need many weeks and you walk dozens of miles a day. It’s rigorous and transformative for those who take on the challenge. One afternoon, she and her dad stopped in a pub along the way to get food. The pub was packed full of people; there wasn’t an empty table in the place. As they searched, they spotted a table with two people sitting there and 2 empty seats. She went over to ask them if she and her dad could join them. Without hesitation, the man sitting at the table said, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

She said to me in reflection, “That greeting made all of the difference for us. We didn’t feel like we had to beg for a place at their table, as if we were inconveniencing them. We felt an immediate welcome, as if we belonged and could share the space together.”

The most important gift we give to one another is a sense of belonging and connection. With loneliness and isolation being the crisis of our age, what if we began saying to our new neighbors who move in, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Or we welcome a new employee to our team by saying, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Or we greet new parents in our children’s school with, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Or we welcome our new daughter-in-law into the family by saying, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Building community, the kind that makes life feel richer and deeper and sacred, is the most important gift we can give to one another. When we find new people to welcome in, let’s remember that we’ve been waiting for them…and tell them so. Of course, they’ve been waiting for us too.

And so it goes.

- Rev. Cameron Trimble, author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight

Prayer for the Week

Gracious God,

Your kin-dom is so different from what is valued in my world.

We worship riches and fame and power, and flashy shows of strength, but you say those advantages have no value in your kin-dom. You came as a servant, and call us to serve and honor others. You say that in our weakness, we discover our own power - power that comes from you.

We prize physical beauty, but the beauty that matters to you comes from inside. It shows up best in acts of kindness, in living with courage, integrity, and humility.

We praise the self. We live as though the universe revolves around our wants and needs, our potential, our success. But you came to radically change our worldview. You showed us how to honor our humanity and find our freedom in you.

Renew my vision of a sacred world, Lord, and help me to seek it every day. Make my vision clear. Teach me to care for the things of Love and the ways of Love over everything that's valued in the kin-dom of this world.

- (adapted from The Prayer Wheel by Patton Dodd, Jana Riess and David Van Biema)