Beloved Community, A new year has begun, and I am ready to celebrate its unfolding! 2020 was a year of challenges on a global level – a year of resourcefulness and vigilance and constant check-ins for our community. And as strange, fluid, precarious and unexpected as it was, David and I personally crowned the year…
Dear Fellow Travelers, We are in the season of anticipation! The word alone can make a person jiggly. “Come on, come on, come on,” we wiggle, “Enough with the waiting. Let’s go!” There are many times we wait. We wait in line at the Post Office, for the results of tests; for supper. We wait…
Holy Moley, Friends!!We are in motion!!Make no mistake about it, we are going into winter with NO plans of hibernation. In fact, I feel the need to remind us all that as we do our fall work of putting things in order for the long, cold season, we also will remember the basic safety guidelines…
Friends, It is October! Why am I so giddy? I have learned to greet the month with glee. I was born on the 2nd day and therefore long ago decided that I may claim the entire month as a celebration of being alive on this planet. I am convinced that the color in the leaves…
Beloved Friends, Thirty minutes into the clergy-only session of MN Annual Conference 2020, I found myself in my sun-porch home office with my computer, my note pad, and a take-out coffee, attempting to digest what had just happened. Two hundred (or so) MN UMC clergy had all completed 4 hours of preparation for this event,…
I begin to write this note listening to a recording of “Amazing Grace,” played on the sanctuary piano by Kathy Webb. I look up and out our front door and the snow-white squirrel that lives in our neighborhood pops up like a Jack-in-the-box in the lawn across the street.
I have long been fascinated by what Jesus looked like at the time he walked the dusty paths of Nazareth. I noticed early and often that the images of Jesus I encountered in the painting in the Sunday School classroom, in the stained-glass window in the sanctuary (pictured), and the small one in a book in my grandmother’s house looked nothing at all like one another.
It is difficult for me to speak these days. It is difficult to stand in a pulpit that has historically belonged primarily to white voices and raise up my own white experiences and sensibility, my own comparatively insignificant pain and suffering. And “difficult” doesn’t cut it. “Difficult” can’t stop us. I am so deeply humbled…
We are studying the book of Job. It is beautiful. It is a wonderful vehicle for considering many of the questions we have about how (and why) we suffer. It is profoundly challenging. We’ve just begun our study and will be at this for awhile! If you are interested, please help us suggest where we…
Beloved friends, by now, I’m certain you have heard several opinions about helpful response to the virus spreading throughout the world. C-19, Covid, COVID-19, the Pandemic – by whatever name, this contagion has its own momentum and must be reckoned with. Let’s respond boldly and set our goal at 0% illness within our small and mighty…
