09/19/2025
Dear FCC Family,
This can be a rough time for sports fans, especially if your favorite team has stumbled coming out of the gate (like certain football teams) or has fallen flat as they wind down to the end of the season (like my favorite baseball team). For sports teams, the goal is always winning the championship. Most years, that doesn’t happen, and you end your season on a sour note. Or if you do win, the joy is fleeting, since you have to start all over the next year.
The same is true on so many other fronts. It’s great to have goals and to pursue those goals—provided they are worthy ends. There’s not much to praise if I have succeeded in becoming a master deceiver, the best thief, the laziest person in my family. But even if I reach all my goals, if those ends are themselves inherently temporary, I’m still left unsatisfied.
One solution is to retrain my mind and heart to find satisfaction in the attempt, to enjoy the journey, without being too concerned about reaching a certain goal. There is some merit to this, I must admit, and a lot to commend it as a way of life. If nothing else, it can free me from living a performance-based life, which always leads to disappointment and self-recrimination or pride and self-delusion. Either way, I misunderstand my true value. And learning to appreciate the goodness in simply seeking personal growth and making a positive difference in the people and situations around me in my day-to-day life is a great source of peace and personal satisfaction.
But that can also be a deceptive diversion from true satisfaction. For if I’m only trying to see what I can do to make myself feel better, I’m missing the point of life, the reason for which I was created and redeemed. Jesus said that he had come to give us life, and life abundantly—but it could only be found in him. Because only the life that he gave would last beyond the few fading breaths of our time on this side of eternity. If I want to find true satisfaction in my life, I must take up the goals that can only be reached and measured when we arrive on the other side of this preliminary stage of matters and finish the journey to those goals that can only be reached by staying as close as possible to the one who has made the way for us.
I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)
To live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:21)
May you find great joy in seeking the kingdom of God, which will never grow old, but endure forever; and in joining together to worship our King with the rest of his beloved children.
Pastor Barry
