Lists

Are you a list maker?  How many lists do you have at this moment in your kitchen, at the office, with your calendar?  Do you make notations on lists to guarantee that you update your lists?  Are your lists kept electronically or with pen and paper?  If the main repository of your “to do” list was lost, would you become paralyzed by the anxiety of not knowing what to do next?  I know I have been accused of forgetting my brain when my “to do” list/calendar is not immediately accessible.    

Fortunately, summer seems to bring a partial reprieve to our need for lists.  But now that fall is approaching, it is a given that activities and responsibilities – our “to-do’s” at home, church, work and school - will increase.  This annual influx can bring on a type of paralysis, also: how do I choose from all the options before me? 

Can you name some events in your life that transcend the need to be added to a list?  When presented certain opportunities, there is no need for us to think twice.  We know we will be there regardless of what else may be taking place.  Depending on the individual, it may be time with a grandchild, a concert or theater performance, a sporting event, shopping, or a round of golf.   You get the idea.  There is no need to write some things down. 

When you consider gathering with others in the community known as the Presbyterian Church in Morristown, do those activities transcend your lists?  We gather by the inspiration of the Spirit, for the worship of God, known to us through Christ.   The apostle Paul shared the centrality of this message in four words to the church in Philippi: “To live is Christ…..” (Phil. 1:21) We exist as the church solely because of our shared profession of this message.  And yet sometimes it’s just easier to add it to the list. 

My prayer is that this ‘given’ can be carved into the very rhythms of our lives, like the beating of our hearts, and generate a calm from which we move into the world; a clarity of purpose which focuses our energies from what we profess to be to the way we truly want to live; and peace as we determine what to do next.  “Now may the God of peace…make you complete in everything good so that you may do his will, working among us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever.  Amen.”  (Hebrews 13:20a-21)