Which Direction to Look

Earlier in the week I ran across the following quote:

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

--Thomas Jefferson

It reminded me of a description of an old and dying church the writer Frank Peretti put into his lead character in The Visitation. He said about his church that

they were looking ahead to a glorious past.

How true that often is- and not just with church. It may, however, be with the church that we are most bedeviled by it. Yes, I choose that word with clear purpose. We are often challenged by the "good-old-days" memories. Every pastor has struggled with it in any church but a new church plant. Even there people bring the way they were used to, even when they weren't happy with the way they used to do it.

There are no easy answers. It is a challenge in politics, families, your local service organization, city council, or college. We often spend incredible amounts of time trying to recreate what used to work, but hasn't in a while as if trying harder will make it work next time.

It won't. That time, the time for those ideas is past.

Hence, I believe, God gives us prophets. No, not fortune tellers, but those who are willing to lead God's people (and others) into the dreams of the future that God lays out for us. Those who are willing to take the chance to present new ideas, new directions, new hopes from the God we claim to follow.

Robert Kennedy inspired a political generation with a quote of hope. I am haunted by it as I get older and find that it is true often in its absence.

Some see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not?

--George Bernard Shaw