The Spirituality of Change

I spent the summer of 2006 hand-digging graves in Harvey, IA. It’s a strange thing to do. I hope it’s less strange to know that I got paid to do this by the city instead of any other wonderings you might have had. There are faster ways to dig graves than giving a 21-year-old a shovel, but the other options were too expensive for a town that tiny. In one sense every grave was the same, a hole six-foot deep with a small ledge halfway down so I could climb back out. And yet each hole had its own soft spots, rocks, and root directions that caused you extra pain. Digging graves hurts—just in case you didn’t know.  

That’s the image that comes to mind as I watch our church move through season after season of change. Change is not the goal for us. It never has been. We shift what we do and how we do it so we can make the most faithful impact we can and so we can learn new ways of doing things for the sake of others.  

God tells Israel in the wilderness that the manna will not keep. Gather only what you need for today, because tomorrow there will be more, and what you hoarded from yesterday will just be rot in your tent. That is a hard word for people who like control. God is asking them to trust that provision is renewed, not stored. Faithfulness looks more like showing up again tomorrow with open hands than clutching today's bread until it turns. 

Jesus says something similar with new wine and old wineskins. What happens when something living gets poured into a container that has already hardened around its old shape? It cannot flex anymore, so it splits, and both the skin and the wine are lost. New wine needs new wineskins. New life needs something in us willing to stretch. 

Stretching hurts, especially when you love the shape you are in. Our worship series in January was Reshaped, and the whole premise was that reshaping is what God is always doing. I have watched what happened this year as you let yourselves be reshaped, especially when you could have simply been resigned. Resignation says, fine, I guess this is happening. Reshaping says, God, if you are doing something here, make room in me for it. One posture leaves us brittle. The other leaves us, oddly, more alive than before. 

These days I do not dig the grave. I stand beside it wearing a stole, and from this vantage point I see things differently. I used to only prepare a place for dead things. Now I prepare hearts for  resurrection. Maybe that is what change has been doing to us as a church too. We aren't just rearranging the ground or tending to what is dying. We are getting the church ready for what God is about to raise.