There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1)
This past Sunday was a day that I’ll never forget. 159 people came to celebrate a new day in the history of Peace Lutheran Church. We came to break ground on a new ministry building. For the past 7 ½ years I’ve grown accustomed to worshipping God in the elementary school gym. Others at Peace have been at it for 12 years now. While the gym has served our ministry well, after a while it’s felt a lot like…a gym! No matter how many banners we put on the walls it still has that ‘let’s play basketball’ feel to it. Every week we’ve come early to set up. Every week we’ve stayed late to tear down. We’ve packed tubs to go back and forth from the office to the school (and invariably we’ve forgotten something!). Worshipping in a gym was fun for a while but the novelty has worn off for me. I’m ready for a move.
When I came to Peace seven years ago we thought we were just a couple years away from building. We owned land. We had a good down payment in the bank. We were ready to roll! In 2005 we sensed God calling us to move ahead and build. We filled out applications with the ELCA and waited for a positive response. We didn’t hear what we wanted to hear. The ELCA said, in no uncertain terms, “Build a strong community of faith and THEN worry about a building.” Peace was a much smaller congregation back then. Our annual giving didn’t come close to covering our expenses. We buckled down, took the conversation of a building off the table, and focused on ministry. It was a time for waiting. People wondered if it would ever end.
This past Sunday, that time of waiting came to a crashing halt! The time for building has arrived. As all those shovels turned the soil Peace I stood in awe of the moment. I saw tears filling the eyes of some long-time Peace members. I still have a hard time believing that it’s underway.
God definitely works in God’s own time. If we’d had our way we would have built a long time ago. Something always happened to stop us. Even though we didn’t like it, we had to admit that God led us in different directions.
In this past year, as we’ve slowly walked forward into this building process, there were many places where we could have been stopped again. We had to be approved by the ELCA. We had to have a capital campaign that raised enough money to cover a mortgage. We had to design a building that was both affordable and large enough for this ministry. We had to get bids that fit into our budget. We had to get loan approval. Any one of these things could have derailed the process. Any one of them could have thrown us right back into the gym. None of them were ‘sure things.’
One by one, God broke down the barriers. The process hasn’t always been smooth but God has been at work! God has made it quite obvious that THIS is the time to build. It’s been hard to wait. For the past years it’s been easy to explain to God that we should start building NOW! God heard all those prayers and answered them with a simple word, “Wait.”
The time for waiting is now over. Now, in God’s time, the construction can begin. I thank God!
