FROM THE PASTOR
Choose Your Own Adventure
As a child, one of my favorite book series was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. In the first few pages all readers were on the same adventure and then the main character or group would come to a crossroads in which they had to pick a direction of the storyline. Each choice brought you into the story in a new way. Once a path was chosen, the story would continue until another choice needed to be made. One single book could have multiple stories that expanded from a single beginning point like a number tree. And at the end of each page that required a choice to be made, it would give you the two options and then in big block letters it would conclude, THE CHOICE IS YOURS. I loved reading these because not only could I become the main character making the choices, but I could go back and start the story again and see which critical choices needed to be made so that the characters would succeed rather than end up dead.
When critical choices need to be made in my life, I often come back to the concept of “Choose Your Own Adventure” and how the choices we make and the paths we take are what create our life as we know it. Have you ever wondered what your life would have been like if you chose a different school to attend or a different career? Which places would you have not seen or people you would have not met? How would your life be different? The reality is that we are all on our own “Choose Your Own Adventure” journey and we’re invited to walk alongside others from time to time.
This last week, St. Luke’s moved to mask optional while in the building. We’ve come to another crossroads in our lives where we are invited to “Choose Your Own Adventure” while also remembering that other people are on their own adventure too. Some of us will be ready to rip the masks off while others may do so more timidly, or maybe not at all. During the pandemic, we all have had different experiences of how Covid touched our lives, or not touched our lives. Some have buried loved ones, some have had new babies, some have moved, some have changed jobs, some have small children still attending life via zoom and others have been among the crowds the moment they could. We are all on our own adventure, and all carry our own thoughts, experiences, expectations, hopes and baggage that has been brought on through the pandemic. As we come back together in a way in which we no longer must hide behind a mask, we begin the difficult work of bringing everyone back into the fold of the community at a rate of each person’s comfort and they choose their own adventure of engagement.
As we move forward, the most graceful thing we can do with one another is to remember that everyone is on their own journey, that all journeys need encouragement and that as a body of Christ, we strive to support one another as we each choose our own adventure. And as we embark on this new path we are reminded with great love, that THE CHOICE IS YOURS.
