Imagining Our Future Selves

What is love if not accompanying each other toward a future we can see ourselves in?

This Time for All Ages mini-sermon was originally delivered at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis on Sunday, February 15th, 2026.

Good morning! My name is Seth Anderson-Matz, I use he/him pronouns, and I serve here at First Universalist as Intergenerational Justice, Service, and Leadership Coordinator.

But for the next few minutes, you can think of me as your Tour Guide as we take a little journey together through a land called Time. This is not to be confused with The Land Before Time, which is an animated dinosaur movie from the late ‘80s. But you can surely find a VHS copy of that movie here, at the first stop on our tour—a very special place called Seth’s Childhood.

As some of you know—and others don’t—I lived my childhood years as a girl. I was assigned female at birth, and then cast in my gender role accordingly.

Before I go too much further into describing the landscape of Seth’s Childhood, I want to pause—both to thank you for being people I can confidently trust to take this trip with me, and also to say clearly that this place accepts visitors by invitation only. Trans people are regularly pressured to give cis people access to our Pasts like they’re tourist attractions. But our visit today is not the result of any such pressure. I’ve invited you here only because I want you to visit, and because I trust you’ll treat this place like the sacred site that it is.

So, within and amongst the hills and valleys of Seth’s Childhood, through memories and mirror images abound, it eventually became clear to me—and in some ways to others—that being a girl does not come naturally to me. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in any conventionally “girly” things. I liked playing with dolls. I thought makeup was pretty fun. My friends were mostly girls. I never tended more towards trucks and tools, and I still don’t in the Present—just ask my wife.

But these facts alone were not enough for the girl pattern to hold across the entire landscape of my body or my life.

And as I traveled along, I soon approached a new land called Seth’s Adulthood along the shores of the glistening waters of the Future. But unfortunately, when I looked out onto these Future waters, I could not make out my reflection on their surface.

I could not imagine a Future with me in it. From where I was, I could not see myself as an adult who looked or sounded or lived like who I knew myself to be.

I could faintly make out the silhouette of someone who kind of looked and sounded and lived like that, but I couldn’t get close enough to see it clearly, and there was so much in my way that I was sure there was no way I could ever reach it.

So I was lost, and stranded. I couldn’t stay where I was, and I didn’t know where else to go. All I could see was miles and miles of impossible terrain in front of me.

What I didn’t yet know was that I could change my course. I didn’t yet know I could change my body, or my name, or my life to become the person reflected in those Future waters.

It would take the love and care of fellow travelers, gentle companions who took me into their company and said, “Hey, come with us. We know another way. We’ll get you wherever you need to go.

The next stop on our tour is a place called A Couple Weeks Ago. In the midst of turmoil here in the Twin Cities and throughout the world, we got news that Children’s Minnesota will be pausing most of their gender-affirming care services, indefinitely and very soon.

It has now gotten that much harder for the trans kids in our community—many of whose families uprooted and moved here specifically seeking this care—to see themselves reflected in the waters of the Future. And what is oppression if not obstructing the pathways to our future selves?

A little ways down the road in a place called This Past Week, we also got news that the ICE occupation here in the Twin Cities might soon come to end. This occupation has ravaged our communities and our lives—especially those of our immigrant and refugee neighbors—for months, and it is tangled up in so many injustices and atrocities all throughout the land of Time. With all we have seen and not seen in the waters of the Past, it is hard for most of us to see any real end in sight. It is hard for us to imagine a future without these injustices, and where these tremendous problems might be solved.

But there is another way. And we know that, because we’re already on it. We have already changed course as we’ve showed up, spoken out, shared our resources, and connected with one other in brand new ways. We have already joined in each other’s gentle company and begun clearing the path. We all have the power—and I think the responsibility—to help keep the future possible for one another. And what is love if not accompanying each other toward a future we can see ourselves in?

Today for Common Ground Sunday, our kiddos are invited to join me downstairs to learn, play, and connect with each other. Our theme today is “loving our neighbors and our neighborhoods” as together we’ll explore some of the ways we’ve seen this neighborly love show up over the past couple months, and how we can keep this love flowing into the Future waters ahead.

As for the rest of you, I invite you sometime this week to write a letter to your future self. A love letter, perhaps. Pick any time in the future. Could be tomorrow, could be 5, 10, 20 years from now. What do you imagine? What do you look like, sound like, live like? Is it easy to imagine, or difficult? If it’s difficult, what’s in the way? Can you imagine another way? Can you think of someone you could ask to help you get where you need to go? If the answer is no, I trust that anyone of us gathered here with you today would be happy to give you a lift.

Come, join us. We’ll get you wherever you need to go.