Goodbyes and Hellos

Bethany and I want to thank the Young at Heart Sunday School Class for hosting our farewell reception last Sunday afternoon. It was a delightful informal occasion that allowed us the opportunity to share some more lengthy conversation with some of you than we would have otherwise. Your generous love offering and your notes wishing us well, will be treasured for a life time. We can't thank you enough for your extraordinary grace and affirmation of our ministry together. Know that I hold you in my prayers, giving thanks to God for the ministry we have shared, and praying God's blessings upon your ministry in the future. Bryan Harkness' first Sunday here will be June 13th. I encourage you to come that day to worship with Bryan, his wife Carol, and his children Rachel and Brayton. Your support for their beginnings in ministry are just as important as the affirmations you have given us in our endings.
We have two more Sundays to share in worship with you. Our last Sunday with you is June 6th. I hope to see all of you both Sundays or at least one of them so that we can say goodbye to each other. I know that our paths will cross with some of you because of the interconnectedness of the Methodist church and simply the highways and byways of life. Even though sad, I know there are others of you we'll never see again in this life. The joy for me is our common love for God and common love for His church. Your best gift to the world is your love for His church and its mission. One day, we will see one another again, in this life or the next.
My mind has been attracted to poetry lately, I suppose because poets can often give voice to life's realities in unique ways. I've removed this short piece from a long Robert Frost poem entitled, "1916 Mountain Interval, In the Home Stretch." This poem is about many things, but it centers around a person who is moving from one house to the next.

"You're searching, Joe,For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.Ends and beginnings-there are no such things.There are only middles."

This time in your lives and ours feel like an ending and a beginning all at once. For us, it is the ending of our ministry in Woodville and the beginning of a new one in Houston. For you it is the ending of a pastoral relationship and personal relationship perhaps with me and my family, and the beginning of a new one with the Harkness family. Maybe though, in God, who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, it is all middle, as the poem says. It is most suredly a place of change and transition with very real goodbyes and hellos, but it is also one place along an eternal journey that has its beginning and ending with God. Thank you for sharing with us in the middle of this eternal journey.