Dear Westminster Family:
I came across a book recently that has truly captured my attention. It’s a book by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove that presents the challenge of rooting our faith in our increasingly mobile culture. In The Wisdom of Stability, Wilson-Hartgrove shows us how we can cultivate stability by rooting yourselves more deliberately in the places where we live. If we are going to truly embrace the concept of “loving where we live,” then stability needs to be the foundation that supports engaging with the people who live, work and play with us.
Kathleen Norris in her forward to this book suggests that there is a wealth of wisdom that can come to us when…”we commit ourselves to a place and…watch it change before our eyes…Stability helps us do the necessary foundation work so that we can pay close attention to what is going on around us, and adapt to changing conditions without losing our sense of place. Only stability can give us a way to accept the vicissitudes of life with a sense of peace, and even joy. It does not limit us but encloses us within God’s love, so that with the psalmist we can say: ‘The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places’…(Psalm 16:6)”
To commit to stability not only means accepting the places where we live, but also accepting the people with whom we live. We will explore these thoughts together this Sunday by taking a closer look at the concept of stability through the Psalmist’s experience recorded in Psalm 16. I encourage you to read and reflect on this text as you prepare for worship this week.
See you in church.
Pastor Gary