ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
December 4, 2025
The actor, Bradly Whitford (played Josh Lyman on the tv show West Wing), said,
Some days you wake up ready to change the world.
Other days… changing your socks feels ambitious.
I both laughed and nodded in full agreement. There are a handful of questions I commonly receive as a minister, and though it might not be at the top of the list, one that probably makes the top three is: Where do I begin? It’s not a question of where do I begin reading the Bible or a specific approach to prayer. The question comes from those who are trying to take seriously the idea of following Jesus, and they recognize that following Jesus requires action. But between the headlines on social media and a quick glance at the front page of a newspaper, the list of catastrophes and situations of injustice is overwhelming. And even if you remove from the list anything that requires traveling more than three hours, the list remains very long.
Allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed hinders our capacity to see options. We suddenly find ourselves rendered incapacitated, which is exactly where, as the Apostle Paul would describe them, the Powers and Principalities want us to be. Yet I believe we need to allow the Spirit to help us see one tree through the forest of genuinely important issues, and that is where our focus should be. In those moments, we must trust the Spirit’s capacity to call others to focus their compassion and faithful works on one of the many other areas of concern.
It was Edward Everett Hale, an author and minister, who wrote: “I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something.” Or as Jesus shared amidst the long and rather demanding sermon that we call the Sermon on the Mount, “But strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). Many people have interpreted those words to mean that if we first work toward God’s kingdom, we can have anything we want. However, I believe Jesus was inviting his listeners to take a deep breath, focus on their own something, and trust that many others are also working on their own something.
When the world’s problems leave me feeling immobilized, bring the full resources of your Spirit upon my capacity to focus on the one thing to which you are calling me. Come, Holy Spirit! Show me where I am needed. Amen.
