Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” Like a lot of other sports sayings, it is incredibly difficult to turn those words into meaningful action. A hockey puck moves across the ice at a rapid speed with lots of momentum and its direction is easily diverted with the stroke of a stick or the edge of a skate. With ten active skaters on the ice plus two goaltenders, there are a lot of variables in the movement of the puck.

I’ve been pondering that phrase lately as I’ve invested some of my driving time in thinking about the future of the congregation I serve. We are a collection of people who have gotten to know each other fairly well and we have discovered some things about how to be a church in this time and place. We have a leadership team that works well together and has learned to play off of one another’s strengths. We have a style of worship that fits our congregation and is welcoming to visitors and newcomers. We have educational programs that are appealing and a surge in young children in our nursery. We have discovered how to enable grassroots mission in ways that engages our people in service to others.

We like the way things are going. We are happy and content. We are a good church. We know where the puck is.

Now we need to teach ourselves the art of anticipation, without losing our connections to the present.

We are, after all, disciples of Jesus who said, “ . . . do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”

I don’t want my congregation to be worried about the future. I don’t want us to fail to live fully in the present because we are overcome with anxiety.

It is a balance that Gretzky found in his sport. He was a fluid skater who appeared to not be working too hard, not too overcome with worry. He simply lived in the midst of the game in a way that allowed him to focus his attention on what was coming.

All analogies have limitations and sports analogies are not the best for a somewhat nerdy philosophical thinker like me.

Of course I know almost nothing about the game of hockey.

And running a church is not very much like to getting a hockey puck to go into a goal.

The church moves more at the pace of baseball than hockey. When considering the entire history of the Christian church, I’m more likely to use a quote that you sometimes hear applied to the Chicago Cubs baseball organization, “Anybody can have an off century.” God is engaged with the church for the long term and many of the great discoveries and revelations of the church have come not in the flash of an instant, but through the passing of generations.

The key to the future is faithfulness in the present.

The Buddhist concept of presentness, practiced by many other world religions, has much to offer to those who contemplate faithfulness in any religion. If one truly succeeds in focusing one’s attention fully on the here and now, there is a peacefulness that opens the possibility of a different kind of connection to time. The past and future indeed become present.

I’ve blogged many times about the limitations of our perception of time and how viewing time as linear is only one way of seeing. Our people have long treasured the stories of times when past and present meet in conversation. We can spend hours in discussion of a nearly two-thousand year old vision of an as yet unrevealed future. We have some sense that an intersection of different times is another way of perceiving the world. Those glimpses of the unity of time, however, remain fleeting. Something in the way our rational minds works limits our capacity to view time as a single burst of simultaneity. Intersections of past, present and future are viewed as anomalies, not as a sustainable worldview.

For our congregation the question is not one of planning. It can be useful to ask the question, “Where do we want to be five years from now?” It makes sense to develop goals and strategies to achieve those goals. And we are fairly good at that process. Our challenge, however, is deeper than just a matter of making plans.

We are trying to discern where God is calling us. How do we develop the flexibility and resiliency to be able to respond to our vocation, which is about God’s future, not about our own desires?

One thing that my years in the church has taught me is that it can be very difficult to determine the difference between what I want and where God is calling me to be. I’m very adept at convincing myself that my desires are the same as God’s. Sorting out that difference is not something that I can do by myself. I need groups of faithful people with whom to consult and pray. Discerning God’s call requires life in the midst of the community of God’s faithful people. More often than not, the call contains surprises.

It is that sense of surprise that I know is part of our story. To return to the hockey analogy, it isn’t just being able to anticipate where the puck will be, it is being able to respond to an unexpected change in velocity or direction. The puck won’t always go where you think it is going to go. There are plenty of surprises in every minute of play in a game of hockey.

The surprises in the life of a church are part of the joy of life in community. Not all surprises bring delight, but there is joy in knowing that we have so much more to learn. There is joy in newness that was unanticipated. The words of John Robinson to the passengers on the Mayflower continue to inspire and call us forward: “I am verily persuaded that the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.”

Maybe the art of skating to where the puck will be involves being willing to be constantly surprised.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.