(This is my monthly newsletter for the Canaan Congregational Church Newsletter.)

This month’s mid-month missive is a little later than usual because we moved. It wasn’t a long distance (a little more than a mile), so that’s nice, but the packing, cleaning, and sorting are all the same. We handed over the keys to our rental home on Monday and are now in a sea of boxes in various states of unpackedness. It’s a little chaotic, but unpacking is so much more satisfying than what seems like the Sisyphean task of packing.

And then I get to one of the broken things. Sure, there are one or two things that break in the process of moving, but those aren’t the broken things I’m talking about. I’m talking about the broken things we held on to, sometimes for years, and moved because of the mythical moment I would attain some sort of healing knowledge, and all would be fixed. Although we released some of these in the moving process, we didn’t release all of them. We probably have a couple boxes worth of my good intentions, procrastination, and denial. Now, though, we have to deal with them.

We’re faced with broken political, economic, and social systems. Our relationship with the earth is not how it should be. We’re addicted to so many things individually and collectively, ranging from substances to approval to, well, relational drama and so much more. We did all these short-term things that had long-term consequences that we didn’t fully understand or were convinced would be fixed later. These days, it sometimes feels like we’re in a world full of all the broken things that someone thought could be fixed someday, and, well, it’s someday, and we’re the someones.

It’s the kind of stuff our faith history has prepared us for. This is why we tell all those stories of escapes and miracles and healings and resurrections. This is why we practice rituals of (comm)union, sing together, and collect and share. There have been other moments when those who went before us embraced their somedays and their someoneness and faced things that seemed impossibly difficult or impossibly broken and either fixed them or used the broken pieces to build something new. This is our moment, and on the other side of it, when we succeed, there will be some who look on with awe and declare a miracle. 

We will know something different. 

We will know we set aside our good intentions, procrastination, and denial to do what needed to be done. We will have stopped fearing the pain of the challenge and embraced the love of our future selves and our successors. It will be a grace we embrace and a grace we create as, once again, we remember what it’s like to move from surviving to thriving.