Thoughts for September

This past summer has been one of the most relaxing times I’ve had since I became an interim minister. However, that doesn’t mean the interim concerns of KUUF have been very far from my mind – concerns we need to acknowledge if we are to use this second year of interim ministry to its greatest effect.

Essentially, we need to have an overall goal that will move us from a difficult past into a rewarding future. Let me speak about this in rather general terms at this point. We have a year ahead of us in which we can deal with the concrete realities underlying these generalities.

In this regard I have found myself thinking about three words that characterize what we are doing together. They are interim, transition, and transformation. These words were on my mind because of their simple definitions. An interim is the time or space between two things (between two objects or two periods of time); transition is “going through” the interim; and transformation is what happens as you pass through the interim. After ten years as an interim minister, that is a process that these words describe for me.

I have seen this process begin with some distress but produce beneficent, creative outcomes; also, I have seen it produce more and different distress.

Since transformation is but another word to describe a change of some sort, the issue is not whether change will occur; the issue is wha tkind of transformation it will be. One can be changed (i.e. transformed) into something with more warts than before, or into something with greater virtues than before, or one may merely keep one’s earlier state of being but put on more up-to-date clothing.

The key to working this out well is to be clear on how we have gotten where we are, and what will carry us positively and creatively into the future. This is where one of my favorite phrases, “counting the ‘yes’ votes,” comes into play. What that means to me is not simply to ignore the negatives; it means not to build on or with those negatives.

Of course, we have to know what the negatives mean, otherwise we may not truly understand the potential of the positives. It means we cannot build with bricks that sink into emotional quicksand; we can only build on a positive, affirmative foundation. If we want a positive tomorrow, we have to leave the negative judgments and hard feelings of the past behind and aspire toward our highest values.

This summer I ran across an image that says this for me. It is of an aerialist swinging back and forth on a trapeze bar. He could keep swinging until, finally, he ran out of strength and the trapeze, like any pendulum, would slowly die to a stop. Or he could see that another trapeze bar is swinging toward him. At the propitious moment he could release his grip on the bar on which he is swinging, fly through that interim, transitional space between trapeze bars, confidently grasp the oncoming bar, and then swing to his destination.

Metaphorically speaking, of course, KUUF is the aerialist who has been swinging on a trapeze-bar-of- the-past. This first year of interim ministry has brought us to the place where we can see the new trapeze bar coming. This second year of interim ministry is where we must release our grip on the old bar and risk flying through the remaining interim to grasp the new bar.

So, let’s take the risk, fly through a few unknown unpredictables, and grab onto a creative, fulfilling future.

Don Vaughn-Foerster