bothfeetblog

Walking the line with bothfeet in the worlds of faith and life means making some hard decisions. Preparation for the really tough world decisions starts with the smaller ones; which are still very important. Let me offer an example.
My church offers confirmation instruction on a weekly basis for 7-10th grades. We meet on Wednesday evenings, as this still works as one of the very few weekly moments not deeply affected by the monstrous schedules our young people keep. Well, guess what? Halloween falls on Wednesday this year. Hence, we had to make a decision whether to keep our weekly schedule or cancel. The question for me is, what message does this send both to our young people and their parents?
If we cancel, we succumb to a cultural craziness for a holiday, (which isn’t even a holiday, just a day we have some fun). If we keep our schedule there’s pushback that we’re insensitive, out of touch, that sort of thing. Not a great situation.
Here’s what we decided: We’ll keep our schedule but have our youth out in the community doing service projects from 6:30-8pm. The overall sense is that kids these ages aren’t of the trick-or-treating years. If they do have a party, they could certainly go after some service to our community. If some of the younger ones are still in the trick-or-treat mode, great! Have fun! After all, I’d be the first to be there, too.
Thankfully, the issue only arises every 6-7 years. No easy decisions, here. What parent wants to make that call when their daughter or son grumbles about confirmation on Halloween? These are the tough pieces if we live with bothfeet, especially in the realm of faith and life. Again, the real struggle for me is wondering what kind of message we send to our kids. Our decisions matter.
When the big decisions and issues come our way, we hope our smaller decisions prepared us for such events. So, I’ll live with bothfeet. I just hope they’re not tied to a cement block.