This week I head off to Annual Conference.
For those unfamiliar with United Methodist life, Annual Conference is a yearly gathering of clergy and lay members from across a region. We worship together, study scripture together, conduct the business of the church, approve budgets, celebrate ministry, commission new leaders, and make decisions about our shared future.
Over the years, Annual Conference has become something more for me than a meeting.
It has become an opportunity to practice what I call Ripening View.
Ripening View is the first of what I think of as the Ripening Practices—spiritual practices that help us grow toward greater awareness, compassion, and participation in life. I call them “ripening” practices because they are less about achieving perfection and more about growing in a particular direction. Fruit ripens gradually. So do we.
At its heart, Ripening View is learning to see relationally.
Most of us are accustomed to seeing ourselves as separate individuals moving through the world. We compare ourselves to others. We measure ourselves against expectations. We become preoccupied with where we stand, how we are doing, and whether we belong.
Ripening View invites a different perspective.
It invites us to see ourselves not as isolated beings, but as participants in a web of relationship.
I am certainly an individual. I have my own story, personality, gifts, and limitations. Yet I am also connected to countless relationships that shape who I am. I am related to my family, my congregation, my colleagues, my community, and the wider world.
I am related to the earth beneath my feet and the tree outside my window.
I am part of something larger.
Annual Conference provides a unique opportunity to practice this way of seeing. As clergy and laity gather together, I am reminded that I am not simply the pastor of one congregation. I am also part of a larger connection. In fact, United Methodist clergy belong not to a local church but to the Annual Conference itself. We are sent to serve particular congregations, but our membership resides within the broader body.
When I sit in a plenary session surrounded by hundreds of people, I am reminded that we do not all think alike. We do not all see the world through the same lenses. Our theological perspectives differ. Our experiences differ.
Yet we remain connected.
Ripening View does not require agreement.
It requires awareness.
It asks us to notice the relationships that already exist, even when disagreement, frustration, or misunderstanding threatens to obscure them.
Sometimes the practice becomes most important when I feel disconnected. In those moments, I find myself asking:
What is making me feel separate right now?
What relationship am I overlooking?
Am I actually more connected than I realize?
Those questions often reveal something important.
Many of the divisions I experience begin not in reality but in perception. I forget that I belong. I forget that I participate in something larger than myself.
The practice of Ripening View is simply returning to that awareness.
This year, Annual Conference will meet in a new location. New surroundings, familiar faces, old friends, new colleagues, worship, conversations, votes, meals, and moments in between. Through it all, I hope to practice seeing the connections.
Not because I always remember.
Not because I do it perfectly.
But because each glimpse of connection helps me participate more fully in the life that is already unfolding around me.
Perhaps the same is true for all of us.
What might change if we spent a little less time comparing and a little more time noticing our connections?
What relationships have become invisible through familiarity?
Where might you be more connected than you realize?
These are the questions Ripening View invites us to explore.
And perhaps, in seeing them, we begin to ripen.
Reflection Question:
Where in your life do you most often feel separate or alone? What relationships, connections, or communities might still be present there, waiting to be noticed?
Infinitely Precious 