What I Can See

About six years ago, a bright young man whom I had just offered a job, after extensive interviews and a thirty-day trial, told me he wasn't sure he wanted to work for a man with no vision. I hired him anyway, and he did quality work for me for five years, leaving this past summer to attend law school. But the sting of that critique stuck with me. There was just enough truth in it to make it hurt.

Vision has always been an illusive topic for me. Certainly the desire is there -- to unleash prophetic imagination of change and growth, to paint enchanting landscapes of destinations not yet reached, to aim at mountaintops that inspire epic journeys. Perhaps there is an artist within (or at least a frustrated musician) that longs to find that creative medium which can yield unfaltering expression of the grand hopes and impossible dreams that wrestle beneath my skin. But there is also a mathematician in there -- an information systems analyst -- who restrains the artistic musician, by his unrelenting demands for deductive certainty and documented clarity. These two children inside me fight often, disturbing the peace of my restless mind.

In practice, I actually spend a significant portion of my time predicting the future. I compute, analyze, refine, and defend sales forecasts, cash flow forecasts, cost projections, profit predictions, and anticipated rates of material receipts, factory consumption, labor utilization, shop efficiency, and even global currency exchange, as well as the creatively-quantified probability distributions of a legion of risks and opportunities associated with running a manufacturing facility in an unpredictable world. (It's okay if you don't understand what any of those things mean; most of the people who claim to understand them are faking it.) I know how to gaze into a crystal ball and discern what is clear and what is not, and am constantly humbled by an awareness that the unknowns outnumber the knowns, by quite a lot. I sometimes feel like the astronomer who is overwhelmed by all that he can see, but even more overwhelmed by all that he can't see.

I can't see the future of our congregation. You are an unpredictable lot. And for all of my efforts to analyze and understand the subtle dynamics involved, the unknowns still outnumber the knowns, by quite a lot. But for just a moment, I'm going to direct my dominant mathematician to hush, and ask the recessive artist to speak, at least in broad strokes, about what his imagination sees.

I see a family -- a large, complex, sometimes dysfunctional, extended family of faith. I see a very loosely-defined "organization" (if you can really call it that) whose primary function is to help people stay connected to each other, to not lose track of each other. I see an organism that is mostly passive and permissive, allowing members to come and go pretty much as they please, which becomes active and effective when needed -- when a family crisis triggers an alert, or a grand celebration energizes a response. I see a pattern of worship that is deceptively flexible: despite the appearance of carefully-orchestrated assignments, people move in and out of designated roles as needed, almost imperceptibly "filling in" the predictably unpredictable gaps: praying, playing, welcoming, serving, doing whatever needs to be done.

I see a place where people come both to encourage and be encouraged, to greet and be greeted. I see a refueling center where some stop weekly, some monthly, some annually, for ritual remembrance and sustaining instruction. I see a people who are ever growing in their capacity and desire to care for the people around them. I see an invisible network of grace, appropriately centered on God (and not on the church itself), where the church offers facilities, guidance, help, and inspiration to energize the "real" work of ministry, which happens outside the walls and beyond the sight of the "official" congregation.

I see people who are growing in wisdom and maturity, with a slowly deepening curiosity about the ancient truths revealed in sacred texts, and a less self-conscious thirst for righteousness and understanding. I see people growing in faith, developing profound confidence in the trustworthiness of God, despite painful disappointments and discarded dreams. I see people finding acceptance, in a fellowship which often sympathizes and rarely condemns. I see people finding healing, from a wide variety of deep and private hurts, in an atmosphere of slow and patient compassion which demands little and hopes much.

I see people who love deeply, and often quietly, who sometimes hesitate too much to share their burdens, and sometimes worry too much about the burdens of others. I see people who love God, and who know they are loved by God, yet struggle daily to allow that love its full expression.

Like the astronomer, I am wonderfully overwhelmed by all that I see.

I am even more wonderfully overwhelmed by all that I can't see.

-- Brother Tom