For Wilshire Baptist Church
My parents were doing some home cleanup and asked if I wanted to keep newsletters from my time at DART. I had put them on the mailing list and they had stacked up. It didn’t take me a heartbeat to answer: “No reason to keep them. Work from the past doesn’t hold much weight anymore.”
That prompted thoughts about other places I have worked and the publications I have stockpiled and need to dump, including a Texas construction magazine I edited for almost two years. And then a newspaper article about a skyscraper in Houston reminded me that I wrote about that building, and specifically the “monolithic” concrete placement for the foundation. In that usage, “monolithic” meant that hundreds of concrete trucks would come continuously over many hours and dump their loads to create a reinforced concrete slab that would be 15-feet thick and would have no seams.
I’ve usually related “monolithic” to it’s more familiar definitions: “formed of a single large block of stone,” or, “large, powerful, and intractably indivisible and uniform.” Until I wrote the article, I might have applied the word to the size and volume of the finished foundation and not necessarily the event of creating it.
I used to look at a lot of tasks like that; I wanted to do it all in one continuous, seamless effort. I used to mow the lawn that way; I’d pull the crank and not shut off the engine until all the grass had been cut. But then we started carving up the yard into flowerbeds and paths, and, well, monolithic mowing is no more. I must turn off the mower to get from one space to another. It’s the price I pay for progress that leads to natural beauty.
This past weekend we celebrated the 30-year pastorate of George Mason at Wilshire, and that milestone can seem “monolithic” by some definitions. Thirty years is a big, hefty number, and it brings to mind a gravitas of presence and influence. But George’s pastorate has not been monolithic.
George has changed over these 30 years, and each of us has too; he has changed us, and I believe he would say we have changed him. And we have changed for the right reasons. More than once we have hit the pause button — shut off the engine as it were — to catch our breaths, take a rest, pray, discern, reconsider and regroup. We have allowed ourselves to change what some consider unchangeable traditions in order to provide space for the beauty of the Holy Spirit — in our work and in each other.
I came to Wilshire six months after George and I can attest that it has been a great run. He and all of us together have created many great memories as we’ve strived to “build a community of faith shaped by the spirit of Jesus Christ.” Unlike my old newsletters, George’s ministry and our work with him does hold much weight. And yet we don’t need to stockpile the past. Our best work is right now and in front of us.