For Wilshire Baptist Church
Driving up into the Texas Panhandle we witnessed an interesting convergence of old and new on US 287: coal trains rumbling across pastures dotted with towering wind turbines.
Wind turbines represent a promise for the future. Coal trains embody the strength of our past. Both bring benefits to us right now in the form of electric power; both have their proponents and naysayers. Wind energy is clean and quiet but it clutters the horizon. Coal is out of sight unless you live near a coal mine or a coal-fired generator. Coal has an established business/economic model. Wind energy is still subsidized by most governments.
I started my career in journalism just as computers were coming on the scene as real, reliable work tools. In one year I went from manual typewriters at the Sherman Democrat to word processors at Baylor to a hybrid computer/electric typewriter newsroom at the Waco Tribune-Herald. In every location there were adjustments to make in how to be most efficient in that work environment.
We once visited a small-town church that had hymnals in the pew racks and video screens on the walls. We sang hymns that we knew and worship songs we’d never heard before. I couldn’t sing the new songs because the screens didn’t tell me which way the melody was going. And I didn’t pick up a hymnal for the old songs because I knew the melodies by heart and the words were on the screens.
Some say the changes we are seeing today are unprecedented. I don’t know if that’s true or not. My mother-in-law was raised on a farm with an outhouse and no electricity until she was in high school. Through the pandemic she attended church and Sunday school on her computer. That seems like some pretty big changes right there.
Some say change is inevitable, and I know that’s true. It can be unsettling and disorienting, especially if it is sudden and unexpected. We can prepare a little but not for every possible scenario. The best we may be able to do is manage our response to change — whether that’s fighting it or rolling with it.
Ecclesiastes 3 famously speaks of change: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” We tend to brush by it and its catalogue of situations because it’s so familiar from wall posters and folk songs. But when we’re living in the middle of one of those changes – “a time to keep and a time to throw away” – it’s often too real for comfort.
We have a friend in the Panhandle who doesn’t like the wind turbines at all, but he drives a truck that carries the cranes that erect the towers. I guess that’s one way to roll with the changes.