April 16thThe Marvelous Grace of Insecurity: Getting to Hopelessness
Written by Len Hjalmarson, Crossroads Community Church
We live in a time of profound disorientation. Some have called this ‘the great unraveling.’ Institutions we relied on are failing us. Millions of people have experienced radical displacement through wars, famines and droughts. And now suddenly we find the economies of the world in free-fall. To add insult to injury, our normal support systems are barely able to cope, straining under the requirement of isolation.
For churches and church leaders, the experience is not different. Our relationships are what make us a body. Yet that glue itself is tested under the solvent of these unique conditions. How do leaders lead when we can’t gather? What can we do anyway? We are definitely not equipped to lead organizations under these conditions. We find ourselves having to adapt to these times while dealing with our own anxiety and with limited resources. Some of us may soon be out of work. We are in a time where we need a new beginning, but we are trapped in liminal space – a space between. We feel lost and not a little hopeless.
Henry Cloud in Necessary Endings writes of the things that prevent us from making new beginnings.1 The problem with beginnings is that they require endings, and the complexity of our current conditions leaves us squarely in-between. We are unable to move forward or backward, and unable to find an end point. The need is for an adaptive response.
But humans, like the organizations they build, are adept at denial. Sometimes reality has to sit up and smack us with a two by four. Laurence Gonzales in his book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, describes the predictable behaviours of lost people.