The Things We All Share

Dear Friends,

I was having lunch with another Episcopal priest this week. He has three kids, about the same age as mine. We’re roughly the same age. I’m from Dallas. He is from Pakistan. Like me, his current parish is not his first church ministry job: prior to this he was on staff at a megachurch in Korea. Like me, he’s led a mission trip: his was to Afghanistan.

I’ll admit that part of me just wanted to spend all of lunch hearing him tell stories about the different cultures and experiences he’s had, so many of which are nothing like mine.

And yet the real gift of lunch is that we sense how much we actually share. Chiefly, of course, I mean the faith we share in our Lord Jesus Christ, but also the way the busyness of church administration saps our prayer life, the way we love and worry about our kids, the way COVID affects our preaching schedules, the way we can only marvel at what God is doing in our churches and only try to keep up.

I climbed back into my car after lunch with the sense that in the eyes of God (and in our experience of the life of faith) we’re all a lot more alike than it looks from the outside. This is part of the particular thing Christians mean when we say we are children of God. We don’t mean that all our lives are similar. Actually, they just aren’t all that similar. What’s similar is our relationship with God. The basis for our unity is always our God, not our experiences. Our great diversity rests beneath the unifying umbrella of our God.

In Christ,
Fr. Andrew