Thank you for allowing me to go!
As one goes through life, she or he can point to significant events that shaped them. And for those with eyes to see, there are times when God uses people to bless them in ways that are, for lack of a better word, supernatural.
One such event for me was my Walk to Emmaus retreat when I was 21 years old. It radically sharpened how I saw my role the church. It focused my attention on the one person who loved me as unconditionally as humanly possible and is now my spouse of over 19 years. And it made Jesus Christ real for me in ways that helped me know that He died so that I may live abundantly and eternally – and that He is alive forevermore. That’s putting a lot of stock in a mere 72 hours. But I know what I know.
After my Walk in 1988, I served in my local church and for eleven years in the Missouri East Walk to Emmaus Community, finally serving on a weekend as its Lay Director nine years ago. That was my last contact with any Emmaus community as I turned my full attention to serving God through my church (which is what the Walk to Emmaus is all about in the first place). My Emmaus leadership hiatus lasted until this past summer when my colleague, Rev. Terry Cook of King City U.M.C., asked me to be a weekend leader on the clergy side.
I am happy to report that our local Heartland Kansas City Walk to Emmaus Community is a well-run, caring, and – most importantly – deeply Christ-centered group that seeks nothing less than the renewal of Christ’s Body, the Church, through the Upper Room’s Walk to Emmaus. Once again, God and the Emmaus Community blessed me abundantly through this weekend, and I pray that God used my contributions, a clergy talk called “Justifying Grace” and my “as-needed” ears and prayers, to bless others.
20 years ago, after long consideration upon being asked why the Walk to Emmaus was so important and life changing for me, the only response I could give was, “I met the Risen Christ!” And today, I can joyfully report the same thing about my recent experience. God’s Word is our firm foundation of faith, and our traditions help us map where we’ve been as a people. Together, they help us build our house of faith. But until we have really experienced God in a tangible way, whatever faculties of reason we use to interpret Scripture and tradition cannot produce the fruit that God’s gracious gift of living faith does.
I want to be frank: The Walk to Emmaus is not the only way to experience God or to discover our own ways of being fruitful. God reveals God’s-self in many, many different ways from regular Sunday worship to serving those in need to a conversation with a bar tender to a walk in the woods. But when the community who hosts a Walk to Emmaus retreat is Christ-centered, gracious and focused, God uses the Walk to Emmaus very well, and that’s what I experienced in 1988, in some weekends along the way, and most recently during October 9-12, 2008.
If you want to know more, please contact me via the comment link, or go to http://www.upperroom.org/emmaus/whatis/. And again - thank you for sharing me with Christ’s Church as an Assistant Spiritual Director on a Walk to Emmaus retreat.
In Christ,
-- Pastor Joel Kidwell