One day 25 years ago, I found myself wandering through the tumble-down landscape of the camp owned by the Presbyterian Church in Cuba. It was the end of the 1990s, “El Periodo Especial” – the Special Period – in Cuba. Support from the Soviet Union had ended with that system’s collapse. The economy was in free fall. Hurricanes had ravaged the island. American sanctions – a half-century old – continued to drive deprivation.
Cuban Presbyterians had invited the congregation I served to visit. We spent a day at the camp and found it to be in tough shape. Trees down. Buildings damaged. No clean water. Intermittent electricity. Storm debris strewn across the grounds. Few resources.
While walking through the camp, I found a little hand-lettered sign tacked to a tree. Habra tiempos mejoers, pero este es nuestro tiempo. There will be better times, but this is our time.
A statement of faith
During a time when nothing seemed to offer a way forward, someone had proclaimed their trust in a God who would not be overwhelmed or defeated by this world. That sign reframed a reality defined by chaos and despair and saw it, rather, as a time to hold fast to the assurance that God will never leave us. “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”
We hear those ancient words from Exodus to Ezekiel, and they come to life in the person of Jesus. No earthly condition or circumstance is devoid of the divine promise.
There will be better times, but this is our time. The confident encouragement of that little sign has accompanied me through years of ministry. I have spoken of it often. It helped me see beyond the moments when I was sure we were at a dead end. I imagine the person who tacked up those words turning toward their troubled context and leaning into the work of change, however they could, trusting they were not alone.
There will be better times, but this is our time.
Looking back over nearly 40 years of serving the church in a variety of contexts, I can remember many such times of trial … when the denomination excluded its LGBTQIA members and split apart … when AIDS devastated the community and the congregation I served in San Francisco … when the brutal realities of racial injustice could no longer be ignored … when gun violence has seemed unstoppable … when fear and anger occluded our understanding of the neighbor we are called to love … when sudden personal loss broke hearts and families.
Most of us have our own list of traumatic experiences, when the world has closed in or crashed down upon us and the people we love. For Christians, those are the moments when a presence calls us to hang on, to trust, not to give up — to be the hope we have in Jesus, as Christians in the West Bank say.
I write this in early September, right after the shooting at a high school in Winder, Georgia, and the failure of yet another attempt to end the war in Gaza — and there are other places caught in intractable violence. At this point, the presidential election is two months away, and who knows what that portends, but it does not look good from this vantage point. One could conclude that the world is careening off the tracks.
There have been many such times in history. On a visit to a memorial to three Black men lynched in 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota, I read these words of James Baldwin: “We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force that can change it.”
There will be better times, but this is our time. Rather than be undone by the challenges of our time, why not embrace them as opportunities to live faithfully and do our part to transform the world for the sake of, and in the name of, Jesus, whom we follow.
