change

Soaring music, fabulous staging, amazing voices. All these combined last evening for a wonderful celebration of life in the classic musical South Pacific.  Written in 1949, just after the end of World War II, the storyline captures the lives of soldiers, nurses, and civilians caught in the larger drama of a world war in the South Pacific and the smaller drama of their love and lives.

In this natural season of reflection and anticipation what are your expectations for the year ahead? Romantic? Realistic? I remember standing at my kitchen window last February, thanking God for a gradual yet surprising measure of healing. After twenty-nine years of rheumatoid arthritis I marveled at my growing ability to do stairs and take longer walks--a Benjamin Button moment. "What are you preparing me for, Lord?" I wondered. As it turns out…transition.

Yesterday, about fifty members of my church stood around a pool in the rain. It was baptism day. As a handful of new believers entered and exited the pool, I thought about the change each had gone through in such a short time. Joy, peace, freedom, love, grace. Cleaned up lives, healed relationships, new habits. These people have been transformed radically by their encounter with God.

Do you, like me, often feel you are on information overload?  Between texting,emailing, surfing and living I declare that I need a bigger hard drive and a updated chip for my brain.

It doesn’t help to view an Internet video highlighting the rapid pace of change and learning that the amount of information contained in one week’s New York Times is more a person in the 18^th century would have received over an entire lifetime!