Going Back

At 5:15 on a Wednesday morning I drove to Annual Conference for the first time in seven years.

I did not know what I would feel when I got there. I had imagined it several times — the lobby of the convention center, the clergy colleagues I would see, the conversation I would have to have about where I had been and what had happened. I had rehearsed it. In the rehearsal I was calm and measured and said something true in a sentence or two. In the actual lobby I was just trying to find the registration table.

Nobody asked me to explain. A few people hugged me. One said, I heard you had a rough year. Yes. We moved on.

Going back is never the event you rehearsed.

I have talked with a lot of people who are trying to go back to something. Faith, after they walked away from it. Community, after they stopped going. Prayer, after it stopped working. Marriage, after it broke and got repaired but does not look the same as it did before. A church, after they left one badly.

The rehearsal is never right. The actual going back is smaller and stranger and less conclusive than you imagined. You do not arrive at the other side of a conversation feeling finished. You walk in a lobby and look for the registration table.

What I know about going back: the moment you do it is not the moment it gets resolved. The moment you do it is just the moment you do it. Resolution, if it comes, comes later — in the accumulation of small moments that were not the reunion you rehearsed.

I preached that Sunday after the conference. It was the first time in twelve months. Someone had painted on the altar table before the service and the trustee chair had already cleaned it up by the time I arrived. The service was ordinary. I preached the sermon I had prepared. The words came the way they always had.

I had not arrived anywhere.

I was just going.

That is, I think, what faith actually looks like — not the arrival, not the resolution, but the going. The willingness to get in the car at 5:15 when you do not know what you will find when you get there.

Matt Headley

Founding pastor of Ecclesia Community. Ordained United Methodist. Flower farmer. Builder. I walk with a limp. That is why I can walk with you.

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