{"id":2676,"date":"2021-07-01T20:05:19","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T20:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/?p=2676"},"modified":"2021-07-01T23:13:43","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T23:13:43","slug":"coming-and-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/from-the-publisher\/coming-and-going\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming and going"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The July\/August print issue of <em>Messenger<\/em> has something unusual: When you turn the magazine upside down and backwards, you\u2019ll find the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/about\/annualreport\/\">Church of the Brethren annual report <\/a>right-side up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since we\u2019ve never done this before, our printer helpfully provided a template for the designer to use when preparing the files for production\u2014so the <em>Messenger<\/em> pages go one direction and the annual report pages go the other. The template has a name, and that\u2019s how we learned that this arrangement is called a &#8220;coming and going&#8221; project\u2014which sounds a lot better than the paragraph of words (and hand motions) that I was using to describe the concept to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m captivated by the name for this printing idea. Coming and going conveys a bustle of activity, which is true for the Church of the Brethren even in a year when literal coming and going came to a standstill. Reinventing so many things had people coming and going all the time, though some of that was mainly clicking from one Zoom session to another. Even the harried expression &#8220;I don\u2019t know whether I\u2019m coming or going&#8221; seems about right, at least for those days when time seemed to warp and we had to think twice to figure out what day it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mostly the term refers to the appealing busyness of everyday life, as in, &#8220;I like to sit in the coffee shop and watch the coming and going of all the people.&#8221; Who knew how much we would come to value all the ordinary things in our quotidian lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Whether ordinary or extraordinary, those moments belong to the God who guards our lives, whether we are coming or going. In the words of the psalmist:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><em>The Lord will keep<br>your going out and your coming in<br>from this time on and forevermore<\/em> (121:8).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who knew how much we would come to value all the ordinary things in our quotidian lives? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[318,319,38],"class_list":["post-2676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-publisher","tag-annual-report","tag-coming-and-going","tag-wendy-mcfadden"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2676"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2689,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions\/2689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}