As a Christian pastor, death and resurrection are pretty real things to me. Jesus’ death and resurrection lie at the heart of the faith I proclaim. In the lives of the people I serve, I am routinely invited into deaths and resurrections of persons and families, though none of them are ever what I would call routine. They are always holy moments.

Death and resurrection imply the reality of endings and beginnings. I have entered into a zone of vocational ending and beginning, a kind of death and resurrection. After a long period of conversation and discernment, I have accepted a call to a new congregation. I will be moving from the western suburbs of Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin to serve as pastor with the people of Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church in Ellison Bay. (If anyone is interested, you can read the letter I sent to the people of Faith Church announcing the acceptance of the call.)

This is now the 4th transition I’ve made as a pastor from one place to another, this one at the end of a 15 year tenure. They are always fraught with emotion. As a pastor, you become invested in a place and in the people there. People invite you some of the most intimate and vulnerable times of their life. You get to be part of their celebrations, their heartbreaks, their milestones and their disappointments. In December, I spent the wee hours of the morning two nights in a row in a room with a dying man, his wife, his daughter, and two of his granddaughters. It was a holy moment as the people who loved him most dearly sat vigil with him, sending him across the river to the Promised Land. Somehow, they wanted me to be there. In January, I presided at the wedding of a woman who had known deep disappointment when a previous engagement was called off just before the wedding. When she and her beloved pledged themselves to one another, I got to share the moment with a better than front row seat, so close that their joy spilled all over me.

Take these moments and multiply them by hundreds, and one begins to see how deeply embedded a pastor becomes in the life of a congregation and the people who inhabit it. The moments come and go; one savors the moment and moves on. I don’t mean to suggest they are unimportant. They are extraordinarily important; yet they come with such regularity that I never really spend much time dwelling on them.

Except that now as I prepare to leave, so many moments come flooding back. I look at a family in the pew on Sunday morning and I get a flashback of the funeral we did for Dad, or the time when the infant child who’s now in high school spent weeks in the hospital suffering from seizures. When I get an email from a former congregational president wishing me the best, I recall the capital campaign for which we shared leadership and how much I learned from this wise, faithful man.

One also gets to work with people for the sake of God’s larger purposes in the world. Now as I leave, I see with such clarity the great ministry that the people of this congregation do, the way we have made an impact in the community and in the lives of real people.

In the weeks to come, I will say more about where I am going, but for now, I am beginning the long, heart-wrenching process of saying good-by to people and a congregation that I have grown to love so deeply. We will remember together. We will savor these moments. We will laugh and cry together. And we will give thanks to God for prospering our work together.

When a colleague heard I was leaving, she sent me a Facebook message reflecting on her own pastoral partings, reminding me that as the Sent Ones, we love deeply but loosely. I like that phrase. Encapsulated in it is the transient nature of life. I picture life as a moving stream heading towards the ocean. For a time, we get to float along with the same people. Then the current changes and we get diverted to other channels in the same river, together, yet apart.

I had not anticipated that I would be leaving Faith at this point in time. Yet, the Spirit blows where she wills. She had created a restlessness that has found opportunity for a reset, to enter into a new season of life and ministry, and to do the work that I love in a landscape for which I have long yearned.

So, a heart-wrenching ending and a life-giving new beginning. Always held together in the love of the One who has called us his own.

Those moments where the personal and the professional collide.

On Friday morning, we were called to Lurie Children’s Hospital to keep vigil with our son and daughter-in-law as they accompanied their 8-week old daughter, Eliana, on her final journey. Late Saturday afternoon, we stood over her bed, her life having slipped away after she had been in their loving arms for the previous 30 hours.

Fourteen hours later, I was standing in the pulpit on the 4th Sunday of Easter, expected to proclaim resurrection when my experience was the raw reality of death. And in this case, a death that seemed particularly cruel and unfair. As fate would have it, I presided at six baptisms on Good Shepherd Sunday.

Eliana was a beautiful little girl. She was active, feisty, and demonstrated extraordinary courage in the face of a disorder that wracked her body with pain. Epidermolysis bullosa is the worst genetic disorder you’ve never heard of. Her skin was finally beginning to heal, but the infection that took over was beyond the reach of even the most powerful antibiotics.

It’s my job to preach Easter, to speak of resurrection and life. Sometimes I find the promises hard to believe. It’s hard to believe the promises in the face of the excruciating physical pain of an infant and the extraordinary emotional pain of two young parents, one of whom is my own child, parents who in so many ways were deprived of the most basic joys of parenting, not to mention handed an unspeakable loss at the death of their infant child. The promise and hope of life seem empty and powerless. At times like these it enters my mind that all the flowery church language we have devised for Christ’s call and promise are nothing more than that. Words. How can those words represent any substantial reality when suffering and brokenness and death seem so much more real, as real as the lifeless body of a tiny baby.

“In the face of this, we have the promises of God?” he asks, a sad and cynical edge to his voice.

“In the face of this, we have the promises of God,”  he replies.

A promise is wonderful in that it brings hope. But a promise isn’t any those things that we would like it to be. We cannot hold a promise in our hands as evidence of its reality. A promise is not the mulligan on the golf tee where you get a do-over when you’ve messed it up. It is not a time machine where we can go back and right the wrongs. A promise is not the fairytale ending of a television show. A promise is not Harry Potter’s magic wand that would allow us to fix things with the flick of a wrist and a fancy incantation.

A promise is a word from God, God who down through the centuries has been faithful to God’s Word. A promise is the word of the Word made flesh, the One who invites us into trusting that in the midst of all the death there will be life. The promise carries with it the image of the Good Shepherd with his arms spread wide open, his hands and feet nailed to a cross, his voice crying out  in desperation, abandonment, and death. The Good Shepherd has promised to meet us in the horrible places that we are sometimes forced to go.

That’s the voice that calls to me and will keep calling even when what it says is hard to believe and my heart may not be ready to hear because the stench of death still lingers. The Crucified One reminds me that the tomb is still empty; Easter still offers hope and life. Especially in the midst of so much death.

We stood in the trailhead parking lot about 20 miles and a few thousand feet above Aspen, Colorado. It was already getting close to noon, a few hours later than we had hoped to get started. The skies were gray and a fine, misty rain was falling. We had to make a decision. Head out on the trail or go back to town, find a room for the night and formulate Plan B.

I was nervous anyway, the kind of anxiety I always have when we’re ready to head out on the backpacking trail for a few days. Have I remembered everything? Will the gear hold out? What will the weather be like? Will the map be accurate and will we be able to find the right trail at the right time?

My anxiety was heightened because just a year earlier, we had tried to hike the same 25 mile loop, a loop that crossed four 12,000-foot-plus passes. But I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t trained well enough and got a mild case of altitude sickness. A year earlier, Plan B had been a shorter, less strenuous, and less spectacular route.

But my sons, Chris and Tim, had heard so much about this loop, about it’s beauty and spectacular views that they were determined. I had trained, worked hard to get ready, and wondered if it was going to be enough.

Here we were. About to begin. In the rain.

Though we talked for a few minutes about our options, there was no question. There was no Plan B. We were going to do this.

We set out, Chris and Tim with all the confidence of headstrong adolescents who delighted in physical challenges. Me with all the doubts of a middle-aged realist who couldn’t shake the memory of the previous year’s fail.

That first afternoon was only a few miles, a couple of hours, and a relatively mild climb, though I remember thinking that it was plenty steep. It would only be mild in retrospect and in comparison with the climbs that lay before us.

For some reason that trip came to mind last night as I was winding down at the end of Fat Tuesday and anticipating this morning’s beginning of the lenten journey. Last night felt like standing in that parking lot about to take the first step of a journey that was known only by looking at a route on a map. The journey itself would play out in time, step by step.

I have thought about this year’s Lenten journey and sketched out some lenten discipline for the next 40 days. I’m going to read through the gospels in these 40 days. I’m going to fast once a week, starting today (though I guess according to today’s gospel lesson, I’m not supposed to tell you that). I’m going to abstain from alcohol.

But right now, this journey is represented by intentions only. Like that 4-day hike represented by some dotted-line skritches on a map, this journey will get played out in time, step by step.

There are some big things on my calendar — a grand experiment at church, a preaching series to launch a Year of Discernment, a big solidarity event with some mosques in the area. I’m looking forward to those things.

Even more, I’m looking forward to deepening some spiritual practices that often get rusty in the rush of daily activity. Each year, Lent for me is a time to press the reset button, to wipe the dust off the practices in my daily life of faith that I intend always to be there but somehow get forgotten.

The gift for me this morning, on this Ash Wednesday morning, as I think about the steps of my journey to the Pascha, is that I have caught a glimpse of the truth that is always there, but is too often hidden to my view — the steadfast love of the One who in my baptism has called me his own.

That hike in the Maroon Bells Wilderness area was probably the most spectacular, most beautiful backpacking hike I have ever taken. It was stunning. The second day, we paused along Snowmass Lake, an alpine lake accessible only by trail, the sheer cliff across the lake reflecting in the lakes’s glassy surface. We could have sat at West Maroon Bells Pass forever, scanning the 360-degree panorama of mountain peaks. Every meadow we passed through brought extraordinary fields of blooming wildflowers.

It was also the most difficult. I developed a routine in order to get up steep final approaches to those four passes. Ten slow, small steps; stop to catch my breath. Ten slow, small steps; stop to catch my breath. Ten slow, small steps; stop to catch my breath.

And that will be my plan for the next 40 days.