Some of you may remember the comic strip The Family Circus, by Bil & Jeff Keane. I always looked forward to reading it, especially in the comics on Sunday. Some of my favorites were the ones when I could trace the children’s footsteps throughout the house and yard and figure out the path each kid had taken in their often zig-zag, round-about journeys.
I’ve been thinking about those little footprints as I think about this sacred place and space we know as DaySpring. Before this was a church home, children of the Methodist Children’s Home played and worked on this land as it served the home as a farm and dairy. Imagine those busy footsteps of many years ago.
Next, imagine what it would look like to see the footprints of the children of DaySpring who have walked through the classroom doors, skipped up the stairs, run up and down the hill, and played and climbed on the playground. Imagine the footprints of the youth and their adventures around the campus, on the trails, and through the stands of live oaks. Imagine the college and seminary students, the 30-somethings, and all-the-somethings who have worshiped, sang, prayed, cleaned, planted, and mowed. All those footsteps would number in the thousands, probably even the millions.
Now imagine the many more footsteps that will intertwine throughout the same paths and through some new ones in places we are just beginning to imagine. In the new classrooms, the steps of children whom we haven’t met, who haven’t even been born, will bring them to learn about God’s love. In the meeting spaces, there will be feet of all ages going through the breakfast line as bread is broken, relationships are built, and love is shared.
We all share in the web of these footsteps because God has called us, others before us and more to come after us, to this space to be community, to work together, to build a future church with quite enough love for all the world.