Keeping track of time and memories is an important task in life. People do it in various ways, according to their personality type and other factors. For remembering life-changing moments, they seem to organize themselves. Birthdays, graduations, marriage, children, deaths in your family… all of these events are part of our big-picture memory train. Such milestones are readily available in our minds, but other more commonplace events are more difficult to recall and remember. In a strange way, the meetings of the North Texas Annual Conference have also been helpful to me in keeping track of my life. Every year at Annual Conference, clergy hear their names called alongside a church’s name – the place where they will serve the following year. Those years serve as a guidepost for my life, and memories are attached to those places and periods of my personal life, my spiritual life, my family life, and my professional life.
In 2013, the Bishop read First United Methodist Church Carrollton, Doug Miller. This year it will be read again for the third time, and I can hardly believe that two years have passed since it was read for the first time. After serving for nine years at my previous appointment, I could only wonder at what God was going to use me for in the years to come. Little did I know then…
- How lovingly First Church would receive Sally and me when we arrived…
- How supportive and loving the staff of First Church would be to me as their new leader…
- How strong and loving and faithful the family of First Church would prove to be…
- How much of a blessing that God had planned to give me and Sally as we lived out our calling in the midst of this great church…
Thank you for blessing Sally and me far more abundantly than we will ever deserve. I am eager to begin my third year with you; God is far from being through with us! Thanks be to God who has called us together!
Pentecostal blessings,
Doug