Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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Three Funerals and the Zilwaukee Bridge

A good many things were swimming around in my head. There was stuff from our church's big area business meeting of the year that gets United Methodists together from half of Michigan's Lower Peninsula and all of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There was stuff from three funerals, and images of the Zilwaukee Bridge.

At the church's annual business meeting, I was very bad and I was very good. If one of my parish's lay people hadn't been there, looking at things with a new comer's eyes and interest, I probably would have been bored beyond tears. The part of church's annual business meeting in which I was very bad was those occasions that I would slip out from the auditorium during business and information sessions to get a bit of fresh air so I wouldn't go to sleep. I figured it really was better to slip outside, than to drop off to sleep and start snoring during someone's report. With rare exception, the business and the reports had been pretty thoroughly hashed over or were printed in the pre-conference materials before going to the church's annual business session.

The items that drew the most discussion on the business meeting's floor were, a motion to add sexual orientation (specifically, homosexuals) to the church's "inclusiveness initiative" for the next four years, a resolution in support of organized labor involved in the Detroit newspaper strike, and, an initiative to encourage congregations in the episcopal area to establish "sister church" relationships with congregations in Haiti. From my perspective, the discussions tended to shed more heat than light on those subjects and, in my impatience with things, I bailed out of the auditorium on more than once.

The part of the church's annual business meeting in which I was very good was when I bailed out of a particularly slow business session and spent three hours dripping sweat and stacking boxes in a 40 foot long trailer/container in an effort to get relief supplies ready for Liberia. Three or four us must have processed and stacked some 150 to 200 boxes that afternoon. When I climbed out of that trailer, I was sore and I was tired, but I felt I had accomplished something. By the time the church's annual business meeting was over, The congregations in the episcopal area had completely filled one container and had almost filled a second one with clothes, food, eating/cooking utensils, over-the-counter medicines, and other stuff basic to life.

It was at the church's annual business meeting that I began to get this uneasy feeling it is ever so easy for things to get slightly "off-target" or some-how, "misaligned," so we don't end up where we expected, so we don't "connect" the way we planned, or so we don't end up doing what we planned we would do. It wasn't so much that anything "wrong" happened at the business meeting, it was just that (at least for me) the meeting never fully came together.

My uneasiness grew when a parishioner, a retired barber whom I liked a great deal, died. That happened the day before I was going to make a long delayed trip to see him. When his health failed, the retired barber's children moved him about 100 miles from the village in which he had lived most of his life, the distance made it difficult to go visit him. My intentions had been good, but, instead of a visit with him to which I was really looking forward, I presided at his funeral.

Next, the wife of a clergy colleague died. This colleague was very responsible for my being a United Methodist minister. He was my mentor, in many ways. He and I never really "chummed" around, but most years at the church's annual business meetings, we had a 30 minute or so ritual in which we caught up on how each other and our families were doing. We missed our ritual this year and I did not know that his wife had taken a turn for the worse in her struggle with cancer.

Then, a young man, a good acquaintance, died. He was just different. He had a number of problems, in particular, he was what is often called "a brittle diabetic"(his diabetes was hard to control). He had to have a leg amputated because of his diabetes. I hadn't heard much lately about how he was doing and he kept coming to mind. I knew he was due to get a prostheses to replace his amputated limb and I was wondering how that was going. The call informing me of his death came as a very unexpected surprise.

It must have been some time around 3 A.M. in the morning, after getting news of the third death, that the Zilwaukee Bridge became a part of all of this. I don't know specifically why I had awakened but I couldn't get back to sleep. The church's annual business meeting, the funerals, and a number of other things spun round-and-round in my head. Then this vivid picture of the "Z" Bridge popped into my mind. Years ago, I had made a special trip to see it myself and, sure enough, the bridge didn't meet in the middle. I hadn't thought of that bridge in ages.

The huge bridge had been constructed by two teams of builders. One team began work from one side of the river and the other team from the other side. Each team had done some very hard and very good work on their side of the construction, however, the two teams did not have a way to keep themselves aligned with each other, so their work got just a hair "off-target", ever so slightly out of line during the early phases of the construction. By the time they were nearly done, one side was a few feet higher than the other and the parts of the bridge could not meet in the middle. What had begun as an error of, probably, under an inch, ended in the span from one side of the river being about three feet higher than the span from the other side.

After the picture of the Zilwaukee Bridge came to mind, some of my uneasiness started to make sense. How often am I, are we, like the builders of the "Z" bridge? We don't really do anything badly wrong, we work hard, we do really very good work, we're close, but it all doesn't connect. What we do is just left hanging out there somewhere like the two parts of that bridge, not useful for what we intended.

We are all human, we all make mistakes. It is real easy for us to get "off-target" and our lives misaligned. For us who follow Jesus, it is the Spirit of Our Risen Lord who will keep us on target if we let him. It is Our Lord who will keep us on the path, on track, so that our work will lead to God's Kingdom. Jesus has a way of making sure that we and what we do are not left hanging, uselessly.