The Crossroads

by Denise Van Eck

Denise is a guide with Deep Shift.   She has been working intensively with the Ashland church leadership as we engage in our transformation process. Ashland welcomed her as a guest speaker on April 19, 2009

This is the time of year that those of us who live in the part of the world that I do feel a bit like survivors. We've endured six months of relentlessly gray skies, frigid temperatures and leaf-less trees. The lack of color and light and evidence of life is okay for a little while, but eventually one starts to wonder - will this be the year that Spring forgets to show up? Will it be like this forever? But of course, death is again transformed to life and evidence begins to pop up everywhere that even though it has looked as though everything was dead, something had been happening all along. There was a transformation process underway, even though it didn't really look like anything was happening.

That is so how God works, isn't it? Working in us in deep, often hidden ways. One thing we share with ALL of God's creation is that we always undergoing some form of transformation. 2 Cor 3:18 says "we are being transformed with ever-increasing glory into the likeness of Christ."

As a matter of fact, scripture is absolutely filled with stories of transformation - of people and nations becoming something new. Unfortunately, not all the stories are good ones. Part of what comes with the gift of free will that God gives us is the choice to resist, thwart or even sabotage transformation. We do it all the time in our daily lives. There are whole industries built on the desire that we have to thwart the transformation process that we call aging. But there are many other ways that we do it too. We often miss the deeper transformation that God is calling us to in our lives, both as individuals and as churches, because we are afraid of change, because we like things that way they are or sometimes simply because we stop paying attention.

One of the most fascinating stories in Scripture is the story of a man named David, particularly his relationship to the King who came before him - a man named Saul. Many of you are probably familiar with their stories, especially David. David is the only man in the Scriptures who is described as "a man after God's own heart". High praise.

Many years ago, I began to wonder - why is that? After all, David is not without flaws. In fact, he did things more terrible than most of us can ever imagine doing. He was an adulterer, a murderer even. Saul, by contrast, ended his own life - his anointing having been removed by God. Both men became as ordinary boys from ordinary families from obscure, ordinary places. God sought them out and plucked them from their meager existences and made each one of them King over Israel.

If we had more time, we could have some real fun digging into these stories and exploring the endless similarities between them. Both were anointed in similar fashion, called by God to rule over his people in a particular kind of way? What is interesting is that as both of these men answer God's call, they each make different kinds of choices along the way as God continues his work of continually transforming them into the kind of men he wanted them to be.

They both do great things, they both blow it along the way, but the divergence is that as we read Saul's story, we see him less and less open to what God is doing in and around him. He has his own agenda. He wants things to stay the same. He actually becomes more selfish, more self-protective. And the more God pushes and invites him into new things, the more paranoid and clamped-down he gets. He ends up consumed by jealousy and paranoia, desperately trying to hold on to the world as he knows it.

David, by contrast, continually submits himself to transformation. Reading through the Psalms is like taking a road trip through David's journey of movement from one place to another. Where Saul stayed stuck, David kept moving. David's story has taught me what it looks like to courageously, authentically pursue a life of transformation. Where Saul worked as hard as he could to try to maintain an unchanging image of what he thought a King should look like - powerful, infallible, the object of worship - David did the opposite. He relentlessly pursued understanding of who he really was and who God was asking him to be. Even when he didn't like what he found, instead of blaming or defending or deflecting, as Saul had done, he begged "Change my heart, Oh God." His prayer was not - give me what I want. It was "show me what you want and help me become that".

About a year and half ago, Ashland made a decision to join a process that the Presbytery put together that they called the Deep Shift Transformation process. I'm not sure anyone really had any idea what God had in mind. I know there were some that were sensing that God was calling Ashland to a new season, but I don't think anyone really knew what that was going to look like. As that process began to unfold, it became apparent that God was working very deeply, and in the lives of people as well as in the life of the church itself.

One part of the process was specifically for Brett, as your pastor. Brett was given an invitation to receive regular coaching as part of our work together. As that process unfolded, it began to become very clear that God was calling Brett in a very personal way to his own journey of transformation. God was inviting Brett to ask some very deep, very hard questions. I will never forget that day that Brett and I both very clearly knew that he was standing at the threshold of that invitation - that he was literally at the crossroads where he could choose the path of Saul or the path of David. It was an awesome moment in every sense of the world, as we were both awed into silence by the power of what was happening.

And then I heard Brett utter two words that I believe changed not only his life, but the story of Ashland as well. I really believe that Brett was looking right into the eyes of God as he said "I'm willing". Those are power-filled words. I believe that God is continually inviting us into transformation, every day, all the time. Some of that transformation is deep and some of it is less so. How often, when faced with that invitation do we respond with those words - "I'm willing"?

What is really important for us to remember in David's story is that his story, ultimately isn't really about David. It's about Israel. What God really had in mind all along was his people, his people that he loved and wanted to transform. Brett's journey is his own, and yet it is also somehow about Ashland. Just as God invited Brett to take a deeper look at his own story, and as Brett courageously responded by saying "I must choose authenticity. I must follow God in becoming exactly who he purposed me to be", Ashland seems to have a similar invitation. And you're free to choose. Later today in your congregational meeting, you will have your formal vote to dissolve Brett's call. There is some sadness in that. Endings almost always have at least a bit of sadness to them. But I think that to focus on the sadness would be to tragically miss the deeper point of the story. This story is actually one worthy of celebrating. It's a story of Springtime - of the promise of things that have been hidden for a long, hard season springing to life, of newness, of fresh learning and the promise of coming harvest.