FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, Collinsville, Virginia

Worship Service with some COVID-19 precautions
Sundays at 11 AM

August 7,
"Sometimes I Feel Like I Am in a Small Boat in Storm"

First posted on August 9, 2020

Re-run Archive
We will continue to have live services on Sunday mornings. Eighteen months of videos are available in our Video Archive. For now, we will feature one of these re-runs on our home page every week. If there was a video you particularly liked or one you were sorry you missed you can find it in the Archive. Newsletters and the letter "To the Church Family" will continue every week.

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To the Church Family

Being in the Right Place

August 7, 2022
By John Wiederholt

Kym hasn’t done much gardening this year and I haven’t done any. With all of the church work that we are doing and moving and family matters there just hasn’t been time. Kym does have a few plants on the partly open deck on the top floor. The deck faces almost due south, the uncovered part has sun pretty much all day and the effect on some of the plants has been considerable. One cherry tomato plant has been particularly happy there. From the beginning it grew like the proverbial weed. It has been bursting with little cherry tomatoes for weeks. (I’m pretty sure it’s a “Sweet 100” and it has really lived up to its name. Another variety sitting next to it, on the other hand, looks dreadful and has produced nothing. It makes me think about life.

The Sweet 100 is apparently in its perfect place. We should have put the other plant somewhere else. When you find yourself in the right place you can do wonders. When you are in the wrong place sometimes there is no help for it but to try to find your way to somewhere else. I have been a minister of word and sacrament as they say in Presby-speak for more than 50 years. I have been a couple of times in just the right place, at least once in the wrong place and in the right place for a particular moment quite a few times. I know that some of you took a while to find the right spot for your life. Some of you may still be searching. Some of you have had the privilege of blooming where you were planted, as the saying goes. All of us hope finally to come to rest in the perfect place for us at the feet of Lord Jesus.

There is a spiritual side of this also. Regardless of where we are geographically in the world we can be in a good place spiritually or fall into a spiritual place which is not where we ever wished to be. In that sense, we seem never to be in a spiritual place which is above making mistakes and falling away. Likewise we are never in a spiritual place so dark and lonely that the Lord Jesus can’t lift us out of it. Sometimes, though, when you are where you don’t want to be you have to ask for help and sometimes you have to be patient until he comes.

My little cherry tomato plant isn’t huge, it hasn’t fixed the world, but it is bearing fruit and it is happy where it is. For two decades I have felt I was in the right place with the right people at the right time. I am grateful to all of you who have been here with me. I hope that many of you have felt that this was the right place for you, too.

Blessings,
John