Last night our Bishop, Sally Dyck, spoke to the United Methodists gathered in St. Cloud. Her subject: change. Using a blues song from the ’30’s "Strange Things Are Happenin’ Everyday" she challenged us to be change agents in our own lives, in the church and in the world. Through scripture, story and song, she wove a great tapestry of inspiration calling for the hope that lives within change.

There is that old adage that the only things we can be truly certain of in life are death and taxes. But isn’t change also a thing of certainty? The very cells of our body are changing and rearranging as I write this and as you read. When we are both finished….we will be changed. Being alive means being always in some form of change. From the time children are born we observe the changes in their bodies, their minds, their ways of being and we celebrate all the growth. For some reason as we move beyond those earlier years, we begin to resist the changes in our lives. It is a curious thing.

Particularly in institutions like the church we shy away from change of any kind…..changes in the wording of prayers, beloved hymn texts, the ways in which we worship, the structures in which we organize our life together. Somehow we behave as if the notion of change holds a hidden idea that, to embrace change, means what we have ‘always’ done is less true, less real. Our faith life can slowly become a stagnant life. We can come to worship the ways of being church rather than the Source that calls us to be church.

Each generation, I believe, has a very important task if they choose….to discern the presence of the Holy in their midst and to give voice to telling the story. We cannot possibly tell the story of how God moves in our lives in the same way those people in the first century did. We cannot even tell the story in the same way people of faith from other parts of the world do. Our work is to tell the story for our time, in our time. And that means to be not only witnesses to change but agents of change….to continue to be present to the winds of the Spirit moving with a quiet presence and sometimes a passionate wildness. It is the Spirit of change that longs to enter our lives, our churches and the world urging us to an even deeper relationship.

What are the winds of change that are moving through your life this day? What place in your life needs to be jarred loose so growth can happen?  Are the communities you hold dear longing to be tilled and planted in new ways? How are you being invited to help that change happen?

Change……let’s embrace it and be a part of it. I trust that the Holy One, in the midst of it all, bids us welcome and will give us courage to see it through to new beginnings.