While we have been in Wisconsin at Cedarly, located between the towns of Delafield and Oconomowoc, I have been attentive to a daily exercise regimen that I have developed over the past six months. This isn’t easy with travel and unfamiliar territory. Yet, I have made a concerted effort to walk and/or hike each day. My newly established routine has been to take an hour to 90 minutes every morning to walk.
I scoped out a route based on intel from the hosts at Cedarly that took me down Mill Road toward Delafield and then a left onto a closed bike path under construction into downtown Delafield and back. Our hosts explained to us that this bike path had been under construction since the past spring. The soft base had been laid, but the asphalt completion had been delayed for some time while other blacktop work was being completed elsewhere in the county. Though it was closed to bikes, it was still available for walking and jogging by the locals.
In the short time I have been here, I grew accustomed to the closed path as a vital part of my morning walking route. Even though I changed up the route a little each day, this closed bike path was a crucial leg in my daily venture. It provided a safe means of walking down a busy road without concern for traffic related danger. The soft base was also easy on my legs versus the hard asphalt that made up the rest of my walking path.
This morning (Thursday, July 29th) I decided to take another route downtown through some back streets to change things up and then to return down the closed bike path, as had been my pattern for the previous three days. To my surprise, when I got to the far end of the path on my return from downtown Delafield, I smelled fresh asphalt and heard the sounds of paving equipment before me. As I gazed down the path, I could see that the work crew had already completed nearly a third of this 2 mile stretch of bike path. The rest was completed that afternoon. In one day, my soft walking path had been transformed into the asphalt bike path that had been six-months in the making.
This caused me the discomfort of rerouting my walk to the edge of the busy road leading back from Delafield toward Mill Road. All I could think as I walked back on this more dangerous terrain of the roadside edge was about how this construction had disrupted my daily walk routine. Why did they pick today to finally pave this path and disrupt my walk? Why couldn’t they have waited until next week when I will be long gone from here?
When I got back to the room and showered, I resumed my study of a book by Gary Thomas titled Authentic Faith. The next two chapters for my study were, you guessed it, on waiting (patience) and frustration (struggle). As I read these chapters of wisdom, I laughed about how I had allowed such a small change impact me so much that morning.
None of us deal well with change. We get comfortable in patterns of familiarity that bring us comfort. Yet, we live in a continual movement of change. Things are always changing. When we don’t like how things are changing, we complain. This was exactly how I reacted to the discomfort of this construction on my exercise routine.
However, when we don’t like how things presently are, we can’t wait for change. We want it yesterday. As much as we detest change when it brings discomfort to our normal and familiar patterns, we also can’t have it take place soon enough when we are dissatisfied or frustrated by the status quo. I imagine a few area cyclists were in this camp, excited about the long-awaited path completion.
Here was the culmination of so much frustration for folks waiting for the completion of the bike path that would provide a safe and resilient means of travel. It was a long awaited culmination to a frustratingly long project for the area. Here I was, frustrated and out of sorts, because I was being inconvenienced by this construction effort. I was comfortable in the interim state of the soft base foundation that had been long prepared for the final blacktop bike path and irritated by the process of the construction crew bringing this project to completion.
This really spoke to me as I reflected on it during my reading later today. How many times are we comfortable in the status quo of a season where God is simply preparing a foundation for something greater and more permanent than the transitional state in which we find personal comfort? Are we willing to endure and embrace the changes God is working in our world and lives to provide a more lasting and blessed state of affairs? My reading and reflection calls me to greater flexibility and patience as I combat my tendency to get frustrated by the changes at work in my life and ministry.
I also have reflected on how this relates to the transitions taking place at Holy Covenant. I know some are reluctant to embrace change, comfortable in the patterns and activities that are entrenched in our ministry as we have come to experience it. Some long for days gone by and aspects of the church that no longer are prevalent today. Some are reluctant to embrace changes ahead, fearful of the discomfort it brings to our comfortable patterns and activities.
The ministry of God is constantly in a state of change. Remember the reaction of many challenged by the new thing God was doing in Jesus Christ. Jesus challenged understandings and patterns that many had grown accustomed to embracing. I feel that this little construction experience during my retreat has awakened me to the discomfort and disruption that even the slightest change can bring. It has made me more sensitive to the concerns and fears others experience in the changing scope of our ministry together at Holy Covenant.
God calls us to grow and embrace the life that is ahead by waiting patiently and enduring the inconveniences associated with the change God is working in our midst. May we not get comfortable in the interim or long for what was, but instead look forward to what lies ahead, as God brings to completion that which has been creatively in process.
