New Year Thoughts

Dear friends and partners in ministry:

Grace, mercy, and peace be with you all in this New Year.

As the year 2010 gets going, my head is spinning.  On a personal level, this is now the 8^th decade I have lived in, and that gives me pause.  Once I adjust to that reality, I'm confronted by the amazing change that is all around me.  Actually, the change itself isn't as remarkable as the pace of change.  While he was home for Christmas, our son showed us a new hand-held communication device.  It finds pizza restaurants; provides GPS directions; plays music; is a camera and phone; does email and internet; and, the most unbelievable thing:  play anything on the radio, and hold the device up near the speaker, and the thing will tell you the name of the tune and artist.  How in the world does it do that?

My father was born before there were cars.  He lived without central heat and plumbing until he went away to school.  Now his grandson has in his hand a device more powerful than the computers that sent people to the moon 40 years ago.  It's the pace of change that is so disorienting to us relative old timers.  At a recent meeting of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, one of the speakers gave some statistics on the pace of change.  He asked us to imagine how long it took various new communication technologies to reach a market penetration of 50 million users.

Radio:  38 years

TV:  13 years

Internet:  4 years

I Pod:  3 years

Facebook:  2 years

The first 'text' message was sent in 1992 (though I doubt any of us knew about it then), and now, only 18 years later, there are more messages sent daily than people on the planet, some 7 billion.

For those of us who are accustomed to drawing our essential values and our sense of personal security from things that are deeply enduring and fundamentally familiar, it is a bit disorienting to see that something we relied on only yesterday is now no longer available on the market, and we have to learn the terminology and the procedures of something entirely new.  I'm still having to carry around the book of directions (30 pages in English) for my new watch with approximately 40 different functions.

These times of change are important reminders of what we've always known as people of faith:  that our security rests in a faith and trust in God's goodness and grace.  We are people of hope, and, as Paul's Letter to the Romans reminds us, it is a "hope that does not disappoint us."  Many other things do disappoint, deeply.  Much of the change around us can be disorienting, when what we counted on changes overnight.  But God's faithfulness and our trust in it is the North Star amid the turning and whirling of the world.  The beautiful old hymn, "Be Still My Soul" captures our point of contact with the eternal in the midst of all that is so thoroughly temporal:

Leave to thy God to order and provide;

In every change God faithful will remain.

Be still, my soul:  thy best, thy heavenly friend,

Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

A very joyful and hope-filled New Year to all of you and to all God's children and, indeed, the whole creation.

David S. Moyer

Conference Minister