Where we are going....

Got an email yesterday from a nervous member, describing all the many ways she thinks my ministry may be off-track.  My mind spins on one particular comment she makes - that is, the thought that I should - rather than have my own vision for the congregation - simply support the Board's vision.  I get stuck here, trying to even understand the separation.  In an organic covenanted relationship like that between minister and congregation, it gets all mixed up, and whose vision the congregation lives into becomes relatively indistinguishable - if I am doing my job, I am reflecting back the place where are being called, all of us, as an always-becoming community - and the Board is doing the same.  It's not about me, or about the Board, or any one of us and our ideas.  It's about the bigger thing we are each trying so hard to discern, attempting to listen for, and love, and lean into.  And I think about eschatology, and this notion that we are headed somewhere specific, and that one (individual or group) of us has that answer - like some kind of humanist version of end-times-predicting.  Sure, I have my own dreams of heaven, what our beloved community might look like, but it's fuzzy and dynamic, subject to change based on the words and wisdom of the community as it evolves each time it gathers, each time it moves.  None of it is certain, and none of it lives outside the relationship I have within and among this gathered people, the relationship I have with the wider Unitarian Universalist living tradition - there is no immaculate conception of an idea, or a plan, or a vision for any of us, JLA might say...So, hush already you nervous heart, my only plan is to keep loving, and to see what mystery unfolds...