After and Before

Have you ever asked yourself, "Now what?"

I have spent a great deal of time working with people in transition, that point in time between certainties, after the last job that disappeared without warning and before the next.

This is the time when our identity is most vulnerable, even fractured.  Many find a need to turn to prayer.

When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.  All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers. - Acts 1:13-14

It may seem odd to compare what the disciples went through when Jesus was taken from them to a modern day job loss, but I don't think the two are that much different on a deeply personal scale.

It could read like a parable for faith.

Faith is like a man who is devotedly working for a company for three years when the head of that company dies, leaving no one person strong enough to keep it going.  The man gets together with the other employees of the company and those closest to the founder and after prayerful planning and discussion, they decide to go on, growing the business into the largest in history.

In that time after one experience and before the next we are most vulnerable, and we can choose to give up.  But through faith, we could be on the verge of something far bigger than we could imagine.

Taking on something new, though, is hard.   If things don't go well, there is that feeling that perhaps it is the wrong approach, that something else may be a better way to go.

For those left behind when Jesus was raised, it would have been so much easier to go back to what they knew before.  Some had been fishermen, some laborers, others had freelanced, making money off the rich and poor alike.

There was no certain future in spreading the news of a Messiah who died.  Even today, there is no money in it, at least for most who choose that path.

There is only one reason people go against the grain and do what seems foolish or irrational.  Faith.

So, for those who find the mews of the Gospel hard to believe, perhaps that can approach it as a parable, a lesson from God for them to hear, interpret for themselves and discover their inner talent and treasures.

Perhaps, then, they will unlock the key to their own faith.

More to come...


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