Late Night Thoughts After a Session Meeting

OK, it's only 9:00... but it feels like midnight. It was not a bad meeting, though the spring break absolutely decimated our numbers. The mood was good; exchange was frank; people were persuaded to change their minds; we laughed. That's my idea of a good meeting!

Still. I'm feeling a restlesness in myself regarding life at New Church (will I ever come up with an appropriate nom-de-blogue for it???). I feel that we need to do what I nervously call "visioning." We need to know why we're here, and what we're going to do about it. We need to take this gift we've been given (trusting that the church is God's gift to us), and figure out how to give it back to the world.

While waiting in a cafe for a member of the session to show up for lunch last week, I perused a newsletter from a local conservation organization. This quote arrested me. I jotted it down on the back of a dry cleaning receipt:

If you want to build a ship

don't herd people together to collect wood

and don't assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It's as if that aviator knew exactly what the work of a preacher was. I have never heard it put so beautifully: our job, in a nutshell.

Avast, ye hearties. To the mains! Or, something to that effect.