Dear Blooming Glen Friends,  

This weekly letter finds me writing to you today from California.  It’s good to be back in Riverside – seeing old friends, and marveling at how much our grandsons in Portland, Oregon and Riverside, California have grown recently.   

Growth is a subtle, slow, and incremental process.  I’m no farmer, but even I know that you don’t plant seeds one day and harvest fully grown fruit the next day.  Our microwaveable culture is highly focused on instant gratification and rapidly gained high returns on minimal upfront investment.  And while that focus may or may not work as an investment strategy for the day-trading of stocks, or the aggressive buy-sell environment of a commodities market, or trading in bitcoin, the reality is true that the journey with Jesus is long and slow.  Discipleship includes much that seems at first to be boring and repetitive.  The gear we carry on the journey – the cross – is cumbersome and difficult to manage on the pilgrimage of life.  

The act of creation takes time.  Genesis 1 could have been much briefer had God decided to simply snap His fingers and have all of creation appear at once.  But for six days, God painstakingly arranged a creation, piece by piece.  May the life of discipleship be the same for us.  Over the journey we undertake together with Jesus, I pray we can slow down and, in the midst of the everyday humdrum of life, see in one another the fire of God through the Holy Spirit, and the Clouds of God, through the church Christ died for, taking us to the New Jerusalem of fulfillment and completion in a long, slow, and steady hike across the wilderness of this liminal time, space, and culture. 

So, friends, the counter-cultural message of Christian discipleship is profoundly simple and very difficult:  slow down.  It’s OK to be incremental in change on the journey.  Sit and listen to one another.  Open a conversation in the church with someone who annoys you, and see what you can learn from them,  All it will cost you is some time.  

I’ll be in San Francisco this Sunday, helping to celebrate the conclusion of Rev. Joshua So’s 33 years as pastor of San Franciso Mennonite Church.  And Lord willing, Debbie and I will be back in Pennsylvania late on June 1.  Thanks, Blooming Glen friends, for the past sixteen months of a slow journey into what’s next. 

Love you, Church!
Pastor Jeff
jeff@bgmc.net