You voice the world into being,
You voice the church into obedience,
You voice us now, and then into newness,
You speak and call into existence that which does not exist.
- Walter Bruggemann, from "Reading Psalm 1"

Just the other day, I was sitting down with some friends over morning coffee to reflect on the Gospel texts coming up later this month. We were gathering around them to help us facilitate a community dialog about what it might mean for our community in this time and place to live fuller into God's dreams for us. This idea of God calling us to be people we currently are not is incredibly challenging. Like marathon runners, it seems we're being asked to train for a long distance race on a path that leads to destinations far from imagination's reach.

And so I've been wondering about this...

Who am I becoming? How is God inviting me to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven (like a mustard seed, like a pearl, like treasure in a field - see Matt. 13) in ways beyond who I am now?

This wondering has been fruitful for me. Over the past six weeks I have begun two new jobs, applied and was accepted to graduate school and I have begun the formal process for candidacy into ordained ministry. This is a liminal space of invitation. I have tried in some ways to ignore these invitations - it didn't work. The other day I gave pastoral care to an older woman going through a divorce. And then last week I did pastoral care over text messages to a friend who was mourning the loss of our mutual friend who committed suicide. I was entirely unprepared and under qualified to be that person. But yet, God calls us into an existence that does not exist.

I wonder what kind of hope might emerge from entire communities disorienting themselves into God's invitation into that kind of existence.

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Timothy K. Snyder is a community developer, networker, blogger/writer, and contributing author to Everyday Liturgy | The Everyday Journal. He is a minister to The Netzer Co-Op (www.netzerco-op.org) and co-facilitator of Emergent | San Antonio. In December, he will receive his Bachelor of Arts in theology from Texas Lutheran University and in the fall he will begin graduate studies (M.Div.) at Luther Seminary. Tim lives in a community house with two friends of The Co-Op and his dog Callie.