AD-LIBBING OUR WAY THROUGH LIFE

 I saw a cartoon the other day of a husband and wife in bed, not being able to sleep. The husband says: "It's funny...when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never occurred to me that they might not know how. I figured that once you grew up, you automatically knew what to do in any scenario. I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed."

A little comic license in that conversation. Not all of life, nor even most of life is ad-libbed. Most of the time we know what to do, what is right, what our faith demands. That does not mean that it will be easy to do what we should. It does mean, though, that knowledge and experience give us the courage to do what is right even when it is difficult, sometimes very difficult.

But there are indeed times in our lives when we simply are not sure what we should do, what is right, what our faith demands. But we have to do something. We have to make a response. When we do, while we are responding, or at least in hindsight, it often seems like we are ad-libbing our response. Our prayer is that before we act, we get it right or after we have acted that we got it right.

We all want answers, the right answers. We all want to know what to do, what our faith demands that we do – or not do. We want black and white. We want the church to be the place where the right answer is given to every question. We certainly don’t want our church to be the place where there are more questions than answers, even more and worse, a place where there is no answer.

And yet to believe that we have all the answers means that all the questions have already been asked. They haven't, of course. Moral and ethical questions keep being asked as we learn more and more about the human condition we live in. And when in our daily lives we come up against a question that has not been asked and for which an answer has not been ascertained and for which we have to make a response, we have to ad-lib, do the best we can.

There is a lot of controversy in the church today over certain questions, questions to which many demand answers, questions which some say are already answered but which others say otherwise. There are those who are unwilling to live with uncertainty, especially in this time of change, time of discontinuity. There are those who say that the church must be the rock of stability with rock-solid answers.

No one of us really wants to ad-lib our way through life. It would be too discomforting, sometimes too discouraging. Yet, there are times when we really do not have any other choice. We have to live our life of faith as best we can, not always knowing for certain, praying that our ad-libbed response is based on what we truly believe Jesus would have us do; and if it is not, asking for forgiveness, insight, and the strength to make amends if at all possible.