A Word from Pastor Nathan

If you have a cell phone and have sent text messages, you’ve probably been a victim of an autocorrect fail. For those of you without cell phones or text messaging plans, autocorrect happens when the “smart” phone corrects your spelling and word choice based on the phone’s predictive “understanding” and “memory” of how you usually craft text messages.

Recently, I typed a message to a friend that was supposed to read, “I look forward to it.” My iPhone had another suggestion. It changed “look” to “love,” which altered the message I intended to send and confused the recipient.

Sometimes ideas come to mind in strange ways: dreams, clouds, music and lyrics, and autocorrect fails. Though the text message of “love forward” made no sense to the recipient, I’ve been thinking about what it means to “love forward.”

Love is a gift; it is the very essence of grace in our lives. God loves forward, which means that God loves us as we are, wherever we are, and however we are even as that divine love invites us to new ways of being and becoming. Love sets us on a journey toward promise and possibility. This love has energy and anticipation.

As parish and pastor, we love forward with one another. When I think back to who I was in September 2018, a newbie to pastoral ministry, green with naïveté, and scared to death, we made mutual commitments to “love forward.” We loved each other as we found one another, and our mutual love has opened a new landscape of promise and possibility.

The season that we’re navigating is complex and complicated. I wish things were simpler, easier. Sometimes I’m nostalgic about the past and fearful about the future. Hope seems like an elusive dangling carrot that hangs in front of us but is just beyond our grasp. Furthermore, when we cannot gather and embrace as we’d like, love feels distant.

However, if we continue our covenant to “love forward,” we will flourish as a church. As we love forward, we will commit ourselves to one another’s care and mutually encourage one another to trust God. We’ll strengthen one another to serve all creation so that Christ’s church may—in all things, and most especially in complex and complicated times—stand faithful.

Loving forward,