Maya Angelou was 86 years old when she passed away almost a year ago now. She was only 41 back in 1969 when she published her first autobiography, “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The book told of her life up to the age of 17. In all, Angelou wrote seven autobiographies. That’s right seven.

I realize that Angelou was an author of exceptional talent and power and writing was only one of her vocations. She got more than one thing right in this life. But one of the truths I have learned from her is that our lives are not a single story, but many. Angelou became a poet and writer after working as a fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer, performer, opera cast member, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and journalist.

She made a lot of mistakes in her life, to be sure. But she also got an awfully lot right.

Her poems say more in a few words than I am able to say in thousands. More than a poet, I believe that Angelou’s strongest skill was as an editor. I once read that when she was working on a major writing project, she averaged 10 - 12 pages of writing each day, which she edited down to three or four each evening.

It is a skill that i have rarely demonstrated. I do OK with producing the initial burst of words. I am less skilled at editing down to the essential. That is why you have to wade through an essay in my blog to find one or two pithy sentences worth remembering. If only I knew which words were the most important.

It is only recently that I recognized my tendency, at times, to look back far too much. I know it is the comfort of elders to look backwards. I know that looking back is exactly how Angelou produced some of her most important words, but I also know that my experiences as a young pastor in Rural North Dakota and my experiences in our Idaho church, while interesting and formative, are not road maps for the future of the congregation I now serve. The challenges that face us are unique.

One of the things we know about ourselves is that we aren’t going back to where we have been. There have been far too many funerals for us to think we might be able to do that. We may not have clarity of vision about the way ahead, but we know that the way we have traveled to get this place is not the way we will be going.

We are honing in on the design and preparations for the launch of a major capital funds drive in our congregation. We know that there is work that needs to be done. And we know that the drive will require faith and risk on our part. But we cannot avoid the conversations that demonstrate our discomfort with such an uncertain future. Last night at a meeting that I thought would be about the technical next steps that need to be accomplished, we couldn’t avoid the hard questions about where our church is headed. We have plenty of gray and white heads in our congregation. We have years when there are more funerals than new members. We watch our short-term growth be erased by factors beyond our control. And everyone in that room, attending that meeting, knows that the future in which we will be investing - the future in which we will be asking others to invest - is not the unfolding of our own stories. New church leaders will emerge who will lead the church in its own direction.

We could spend years in planning and trying to direct the institution’s path to the future and it would still go the way that God calls it to go. The leaders who will guide the next generation of faith in our church will belong to the next generation - not to our time.

Part of me is very excited about this opportunity that lies ahead. We are being given a way to invest in a story that goes beyond the span of our own lives. Life doesn’t often offer us the ability to get out of our own selfishness and truly reach for the future that is beyond our stories.

Part of me is a bit frightened. I’ve been around long enough to know that I am capable of colossal mistakes. I realize how foggy my picture of the future really is. Some days I am so unable to see the way ahead that I don’t even know if I am facing the right direction. “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” the Bible says. The problem with that is that we are riding a fast-paced institution with changes that come at an ever-accelerating pace. At some point, staring at the rearview mirror is not the way to be driving.

The answer, of course, is that God’s vision rarely appears to a single person with the clarity that can move an entire people. Jonah’s story is in the bible in part because it is unique. Never before and not yet again in the stories of our people have seven words (In forty days Ninevah will be destroyed) provided the inspiration for an entire group of people to turn from their ways and start a new life headed in a new direction. For most of the history of our people it has taken groups to see the vision.

Our faith is not determined by what I believe, but rather by what we believe.

I’m not content at this point in my life to be the old guy who always contributes to the conversation only reminiscences of the past, but I am close enough to that to understand the value of past experience. And I am close enough to it to keep my eyes and ears open for the new leadership that is emerging.

Unlike Angelou, I haven’t even started to write my first autobiography yet.

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