Bring Everyone Along: Be Where Your Feet Are
by Lisa Allgood, Executive Presbyter
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
This phrase has come to me in a couple of different ways recently. I have a friend who is a member of AA, and that’s a phrase used to center people when they are tempted: where are your feet right now? I love that because it pulls everyone right back to a mindful present – the past is past, the future is not yet, and all we have is right now and the choices we make and actions we take – right now.
Someone else recently used the statement “be where your feet are” in a similar context – to pull a person struggling with their present situation back into their power in their present scenario, and get them out of a useless longing for a sugar-coated past that honestly never existed. This was about a painful unwanted divorce, and while using that phrase in the midst of someone’s pain may feel – well, unfeeling – in fact it was a good reminder for the person that despite the pain, they still have agency.
In any situation, we have that power to make a different choice – to turn something, or someone, around to face a good future. Don’t we all love Jeremiah 29:11 as the promise of favor, in the midst of darkness? Or the C.S.Lewis quote “you can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending”?
So many of our churches feel that they are in that place. They don’t know how to change to grow, to be a court of the Kingdom in the place they are, to be relevant. And so they lament that they don’t have that golden past they thought they had (Kids! Young families! Programs!) – but they don’t change anything to get back to vibrancy. And so they shrink away to nothing.
I ask you – challenge you – where are your feet right now? What does the neighborhood around you look like, where your feet are (I guarantee there are people in that neighborhood who need Jesus)? What resources do you have that you can offer to a hurting world, where your feet are right now?
Start there. And change the ending into something beautiful that honors God.
