Change is hard! Change is hard work!
We are living with this reality in the office here at our church facility. If you haven’t been by the offices in a week or so, you won’t recognize it when you do stop by. Right now everything is torn out from the main office area. Tonya is literally working from a 6-foot table we brought in. The wallpaper and carpeting is gone. The desk, countertop, and cabinets are gone. It is truly a bare wall, bare floor, bare room except for a few tools that Dan is using in his deconstruction and prep work for the remodeling that will soon be taking place.
This change is even affecting Short and me. Short has already cleared off the shelves in her office, awaiting the same demolition process to begin in her space. If you look in my office you’ll see boxes, mostly empty but some full, taking up floor space in my area. Yes, all the ministry mementos, all the books, and all the other odds and ends that have a place in my office are about to be put in boxes and stored elsewhere until the remodeling process is complete.
The hard work of change in the remodeling process is more than just removing old items that has served this church well for many years. The hard work is also about finding new ways of doing things until the new furniture arrives and the office equipment is back in its place. The hard work also comes into play as we sort through all the “stuff” before we put it into a box, to determine if this is something that needs to be kept or is this something to throw away. Is this item something that is no longer useful or is this something to hang on to. As many of you know, these are not always easy questions to answer…especially since so many of us in our culture are ones that hang on to stuff.
Change is hard because we are all creatures of habit. We tend to get comfortable with our surroundings and often we expect things to stay the same. I once read a report that talked about how a person gets so used to the clutter or things in their space that often they fail to notice what is really there or what things are really like. This is why some people will look in my office and see a mess. Yet when I walk into my office I don’t see the mess, I see all my stuff and the work that I do that involves or includes the things on my desk and floor. We’ll have to have a grand reopening when the remodeling work is done, then you can see my office when it is neat and tidy. ☺
Change is hard because sometimes it involves the ways of thinking that have made sense previously, yet maybe aren’t working so well in a new day. An example for me personally is that there are certain things that I have thought and practiced in my ministry all these years. But what I’m finding is that in the last few years those same practices are no longer effective, useful, or even beneficial to me and our church.
Because of this, I have applied to participate in the next Practical Church Leadership program offered through a partnership with DWU and the Dakotas Conference. It’s a year long certificate program that allows me the opportunity to meet with other pastors from across the Conference and the nation, and together we learn new ways of thinking, communicating, and being in ministry in today’s world that will allow me and our church to be more effective in sharing the Good News of Jesus with the world.
Change is hard! Change is hard work!! But hopefully the outcome of all the hard work is something useful, beautiful, and helpful for each of us to continue on in our walk of faith and being a follower of Jesus Christ. Here’s to the hard work! Let’s all press on for God’s greater glory!
Pastor Keith