Discipleship Letters 117-118

I wrote all my discipleship letters during my pastorate. I wrote one every Sunday. I started to pastor a church in July 01, 2005. I began to write my weekly discipleship letter on February 17, 2008. I don’t remember what I wrote. But when I read them again before posting them on my blog, I am taken aback by what I wrote during the period of my pastorate. All these letters function like a photo, capturing a precious moment in time. Discipleship Letters 117-118 are the last two letters that I wrote before I left the church. More or less, they captured my emotion, struggle, and thought at the moment.

Discipleship Letter 117                                              Dec. 19^th, 2010

“I shall always be grateful to the people at Augustana for putting up with me. God, I was young. There are some advantages to being young. But there is also an arrogance and self-righteousness that often comes with youth that I suspect clung to me. I was smart, but I had not yet learned to listen. I am not sure how any of us learns to listen, but I suspect for people like me, people who seem ‘in control,’ you simply have to be ‘stopped.’” [Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 94.].

In this congregation, I am considered as an “old” man. In ministry, I am just a young pastor. I ponder upon my personality and character, asking “Am I prideful and arrogant?” I personally don’t think so because I am highly aware of my own strengths and weaknesses. I do what I am good at; it’s necessary for me to do what I am not good at. If I know my weaknesses so well, what is the point to say that I am good, and I am better than you? Either I am foolish or my level of self-awareness is lower than what I’m aware of. Otherwise, there is no point.

But I guess my state of being young comes with pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness. These characters are just there. Because of what are out there within me, I am grateful to the people at this church, especially this congregation, for putting up with me. God, I am getting old.

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Discipleship Letter 118                                              Dec. 26^th, 2010

“Does the future belong to the young, or does the future make us young?...No one is too old to begin something new, even if we can never begin the same thing a second time…Creative powers are awakened at every age, when new possibilities emerge and if they are recognized as such. In this sense we are always standing at the beginning” [Jurgen Moltmann, In the End—The Beginning: The life of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), p. 27.].

I could never begin to minister to a church as a new pastor graduated from seminary because I am no longer new. Like an Indian proverb says, “You can never enter the same river twice.” For sure, I will minister to another church in the future. But it won’t be the same: different locality, different people, and a different person. The end of this makes me recall the relations, for good and ill, in the past; the beginning of that awakens my dream of the future. Standing in the middle, I look backward with memory, and yet I look forward with hope as if I were standing at the beginning.

In the end of a contract is the beginning of a covenant. In the end of a wonderful pastor-parish relation is the beginning of our companionship. The former relation is maintained through weekly activities; the latter one is nurtured through spontaneous mutuality. In the End is the Beginning.

The future makes us young.