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A Note From Pastor Andrew

Happy New Year!

When I first arrived at FLC and throughout these first six months as your pastor, I hope you have heard me at some point refer to “the journey of discipleship.” It is perhaps an overly wrought metaphor for the Christian life, but I find it captures the experience we often feel as disciples – at times on the mountaintop, at others in the desert, and still others in the middle of the ocean. It often makes me think of a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where Bilbo tells Frodo, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Indeed, as in Middle Earth so in our world today, it is all too easy to set out and be swept off to unknown places. But I’m also reminded of Jesus’s words in the Gospel of John when conversing with Nicodemus, Jesus remarks how the movement of the Spirit is much like the wind stating, “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

Bilbo is right that to take any journey can be dangerous business, but the grace of God is such that being swept off our feet might just be the movement of the Spirit in our lives, taking us on down the road to discovering what it means to be like Christ in this world.

In my first sermon at FLC, I suggested we take a deep breath and not rush this journey of discipleship. I confess that in these last six months, I have not always held to that same suggestion – at times wanting to push and get more quickly to the destination I had in mind. But that is not the journey of discipleship, it is not simply about self-fulfillment, but that earth shattering reality of death that leads now in Christ to resurrection life.

I’m very grateful for how you all have supported, and been patient, and listened to me these past six months. I’m certain that just as God worked in the dark and silence of Advent to bring forth the light of the world, so too God is working in all of us at FLC – a journey that will lead to that expression of light to this world, to being windswept by the Spirit to places we had not thought to journey, to Christ in us.

As the calendar flips to 2025, we continue this journey of discipleship as the body of Christ that is Faith Lutheran Church in Columbus, WI – may we pick up our feet, for the wind of the Spirit is blowing and by the grace of God we journey on.

May the peace of Christ guard your hearts,

Pr. Andrew

Read more from the January newsletter and previous newsletters. Also visit the Calendar page to know more about Faith Lutheran Church in Columbus, Wisconsin.