Oct 13, 2021 5 min read

It’s not Goodbye

I’m normally well-structured in the messages that I’ve prepared for you over the last 16-17 months, but this message is one I wanted to prepare for you organically as I  thought over the last couple weeks, the journey that we kind of made a left turn towards, but one that we’ve come together collectively about.

Just as much about that passage from Ezekiel  resonated together as a church family – I really  believe this message. Moses’s last moments really touched where we are as a family as a faith, as a congregation, as friends and family together and as we decide where we want to go from here. . .  

Moses, for all intents and purposes, is you look at his familial structure

None of those things would have precipitated to a lineage or a history that we have in front of us. He was flawed. he was broken, but yet he was called. he was encouraged. he made mistakes in that journey, but all along  the way, he was encouraged, he was taught he was led, he was gifted and in that he led a group of lost souls through the desert, through persecution through op;pression, through days where they juist didn’t think they were going to make it, because there was a promise, from our God, from Moses’s Yaweh that they were going to reach the promised land. Generations set out for that gift of the land that would be and so many through the journey couldn’t withstand the trials or the storm and never made it. But here we are at the cusp. Moses sees the promised land finally. It’s one thing to be told you are going to receive something and then just p[perpetually skate, but it is something else to actually see it to almost be able to touch it, to feel it. and it’s in that moment that Moses is told  he is niot going to get to go there and in that moment  that Moses passes on the legacy to the next person and through the teaching and the tuitelage the Israelites continue

She remembers being angry abou this scripture .

Only two real old testament Transliteraions of Hebrew passages that got her fire going was this passage from Deuteronomy and actually Job.   

I couldn’t understand why a giving and promising and everlasting God loving and understanding God that we are told gives us salvation would in my mind challenge me to feel like there was unnecessary pain. Why make this man – Moses – go through the trials and tribulations of being pushed out – for all intents and purposes – on a river in the hopoe that someoene would pick him up as opposed to dying at the hands of a jealous leader. All to then be called and to take and bring and lead and be questioned and still never waver in faith to get to the promised ;land and be told you’re not going to get there. It doesn’t seem fair.

For me and for us today, those pivotal moments oin Moses’s life, as I prayed aboutr what I wanted to share with you thhis last Sunday. A lot of those messages. I can realte to different periods of time for us.   

I remember duing the shiutdown because of covcid coming into this building and waiting until the leadership teram and their first wave of meetings to discuss the possibility of what it means to bring in an in terim . 

I’m an 80-year old woman nobody wants to listen to what I have to say and it was in that moment that the connectiopn was made. 

I remember leaving that niught on my way home there is no way I promise you that I’m tasking on an interim.

I just felt that connection with us. As timwe went on in the beginning of this journey, we didn’t meet congregationally in a setting because covid numbers were so high. So I tried very hard to relate to you viua our new technology, which is not a forte of mine. So I remember trying to do it in snippets so we could get comfortable 

One of those other dots of connection is being relatable to you. 

32 questions bout what would you want to know about Pastor Nicky.

It was fun and we got some laughs and it was so utterly uncomortable for me.

It gave me an opportunity to let you know who I am and gave me some information to let me know who you are.

This leadership team pulled together to clean and saniutize so that we could assure you that when you came back to worship that you would be safe and you would not transmit.

Worship was different, but the sprit was always there.

As we approached the Lenten season, Ezekel spoke. 

I truly feel that we are called to be that body 

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