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By Melanie Mar Chow

I seized an opportunity to attend the Urbana 18 Student Missions Conference and was reminded that no one transitions from one year to another better than this. How awesome it was to be with like-minded people who love on the college campus and know what it means to join into worship and praise of our Lord Jesus. Urbana offers something that many don’t experience: the experience of being with thousands of people who intentionally gather for a week in a freezing cold environment (ok Cali bias) to praise Jesus and be encouraged to do something bigger than our individual experience could ever offer via missional communities sharing the infectious love of Jesus.

This isn’t from just a perspective of a first-timer; I just came back from my 5th Urbana. Even more so, I need people who don’t think exactly like me to view God in a more wholistic way. In the book Anam Cara, author John O’Donohue reminds us the value of relationships that “space and time are the foundation of human identity and perception. We never have a perception that does not have each of these elements in it”. He goes on to say that “even the person that you are closest to, the one you love, is still a separate world from you. Two people become so close that they really want to become one; but their separate spaces keep the distance between them. Time always separates us.”

The Urbana conference ends with a few hours of worship and the wait to ring in the new year together. The worship this year was something short of heaven (as no one can say we truly experience heaven). There was an intentional diversity of music styles, languages, and even gathering people of ethnic identities and different talents (instrumental, voice, and dance) together to bring the group to worship. At the beginning I wondered how they would manage worship for two hours, but once it started, it could have gone on for longer.

But all too soon, the countdown began and what seemed like a long conference ended quickly with a charge to continue the spirit of celebration in our lives. There is always a countdown in life and whether we recognize it or not, God is preparing us for the day instead of dwelling on the past. It is good that we have rituals and markers for change to occur. If we acknowledge the countdowns in our daily activities, we can better ready ourselves for change.

In the planning office, I heard someone say “T-minus 4 hours” until the conference ends. I had to look up the meaning because my point of reference to that phrase as a child was from astronauts launching into space from Cape Canaveral. “T-minus” meant time minus, so it was 8 pm, four hours from when the conference was to end at midnight. However, time when you experience what God is doing sometimes seems limitless. I had people asking me if I felt different that we are now in another year. As an elderly person, I continue to watch these moments blur into others and had to ask myself for a moment, do I feel any different from 2018 to 2019?

I wondered if as a family, we didn’t plan well as 2018 became 2019; we all saw it separately, and was it okay that we were all over the US. Hubby was in bed and had no exposure to any new year countdown sheep to help bring needed rest from his busy work week. Daughter was with friends sleeping on the Rose Parade route counting down the minutes to the new year in the cold. And of course, I was miles and two time zones away in St. Louis. So space and time did separate us, but it was course corrected in a matter of hours, we counted down the time until our family was all together, striving to be family. As you countdown to the new year and embrace what time has for you, will you make an effort to embrace change as time passes?

Rev. Melanie Mar Chow serves God through Asian American Christian Fellowship, the campus ministry division of the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society (JEMS). She has been an ordained American Baptist minister since 2004. A Pacific Northwest native, she currently lives with her husband and daughter in Southern California.