Allowing space for a new story

A Future Not Our Own by Oscar Romero

It helps, now and then, to step back

and take the long view.

the kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,

it is beyond our vision.

 

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of

the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete,

which is another way of saying

that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

 

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings wholeness.

No programme accomplishes the church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

 

This is what we are about:

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

 

We cannot do everything

and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something,

and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,

an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

 

We may never see the end results,

but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders,

ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

 

For the past few months I have been processing what rejection means. Why have I been told that I don’t have a call to the priesthood and I guess the answers are more complex than can be explained at this moment. But what it has done is humble me. The thing is that whether I am ordained or not, my job is to do God’s will. And that doesn’t mean that I will see the kingdom, it doesn’t mean that I will see the end results of my part in this project. My job is to make peace with the “future not our own.” As I watch clergy and others engage in acts of social justice/change…I realize that it is so easy to think that we are going to make something happen. It is easy to believe that we are the ones at work in the world. I guess a part of my yearning for ordination is very much about being a builder rather than a worker. I am talented and there are solutions in my head for the world’s problems, but that doesn’t mean that I have to implement them all or be ordained to execute.

Below is a video from an Israeli graphic designer trying to change the image of the Middle East. He is doing one small act that changes the story and recognizes a future not his own. In another TedTalk, Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie talks about “the danger of a single story“. To acknowledge my smallness and my inability to actually see the end result, is a process of telling myself a new story. So maybe social change is that simple–be a worker who offers a simple and yet radically different story. Here is what that might look like: