I grew up along the coast and knew much of the low
and high tides. The type, time and flow of the tides spoke to us of the potential
for success…catching fish, shrimp, crab and harvesting oysters. During some
seasons it was the high tide you wanted to journey with and during other
seasons it was the low tide.
Every journey our Convention leadership has set out upon has yielded
fruit. No journey was in vain. Every wave of leadership throughout our history traveled down currents that were appropriate for the time. So like my
predecessors, I began to set us toward continued forward movement through a process called the Journey of 180.
The events of our last Dream Team meeting halted the
forward movement process by asking the question “How can we really and authentically move
forward and enact change when we sense a lack of community, understanding,
identity and mission between our member congregations?” At that point, we were at
a stand-still.
It was not until
I started agonizing over this exit from fast-paced forward movement that I
remembered my Granddaddy Wood teaching me about the stand-stills or Stillwater.
The stand-still is a moment between
the journeying tides. It is a moment when the water stops its movement, when
the ecological system pauses to embrace a directional change and the biological
community prepares for any cultural shifts that may occur with the change of
direction. Without a stand-still between the tides, the sudden shift in the movement
of water would be so traumatic that it would damage the ecosystem.
So I started to study this phenomenon in more detail
and what I uncovered blew me away! Intertidal ecology is the study of
intertidal ecosystems, where organisms live between the low and high water lines.
At low tide, the intertidal is exposed whereas at high tide the intertidal is
underwater.
Intertidal organisms experience a highly variable
and often hostile environment and have adapted to cope with and even exploit these
conditions and produce what is called the Edge
Effect.
During low tide, places become dry with puddles,
it is where fish have laid eggs, fiddler crabs surface from their mud-homes and all sort of edge creatures
move around. Birds come to feed and leave droppings.
During high tide, this once dry place is now covered with
water, fish are swimming over what used to be dry and is now rich with the
garbage low tide life left behind.
There is much life that moves with the movement of
the tide over the changing bottom which is wet for a time and then dry. This community that lives on the edge, scientists
say is the most intense place in the world. This is the edge and edges are the
most abundant places for life.
Water and land edges are the richest as opposed to
forest and prairie edges and the sea edge is the richest of all because of the
tides.
Now I wonder is it questionable why Jesus called us
to be fishers, is it any wonder he modeled a life that was lived on the edge.
Is it any wonder that our greatest thinkers, theologians and changers of the
world were men and women who camped on the edge?
Maybe the journey thus far was to be just that…to
discover that the destination is not as near as important as the journey
itself. Perhaps our calling to community is to learn how to slow down and embrace
the Edge Effect…to exploit our diversity, to adapt to the ebb and flow of the
currents around us, create spaces for many things to happen in many different
places and to embrace life in Jesus Christ.
