On Thursday the local sheriff’s office called.

“Do you pastor at Grace Ambassadors church over there?”

“Yes.”

“Your building is on fire!”

When I arrived, there were three different volunteer fire teams, police, and two water tankers parked around the building (which was still standing).

The electric fire which started on the rear exterior of the building had already been put out. The fire had been stopped from damaging most of the building, though smoke had already done its permeating damage inside and water had soaked all the crawlspaces.

Meetings this coming Sunday and Tuesday are cancelled while we make plans for the future. We will need a new place to meet.

These days we all live in a state of flux.

It seems nothing is left unchanged. Guidelines change, models change, recommendations change, the economy has changed, church has changed.

Everybody is riding a curve and many of us are getting motion sickness with the frequent changes.

It is comforting to know what does not change with every wind of news in this dispensation: the grace of God.

Every day in this dispensation, God is doing the same thing he was the day before: dispensing his grace to an evil world. It is good news, but it should not be news.

His grace does not change. It is always needed, consistent, abundant, strong, and sufficient. We are saved by grace, we stand in grace, we walk by grace.

Our church will persist through these changes by the grace of God, which is how we would have continued anyway.

Thank God for His unchanging grace.

(1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Justin “time to change” Johnson