Today is another spectacular day that proclaims that spring is in our midst. But of course, that may change at any moment. This year has been a particularly curious dance between teases of spring, summer, and winter all jumbled into one another, sometimes even within a single week. You all know how I love watching the natural world and the ways that creation is constantly beckoning for us to pause and pay attention. Yesterday, my daughter Berit sent a picture of a middle-aged member of her Holden community down on his hands and knees smelling the daffodils. You can still see lots of melting snow piles in the photo from that mountain village, and there is James taking the time to go all-in with smelling the flowers!
Within the church year we have entered the Easter season. For a week of weeks we celebrate the good news of Jesus' resurrection. We hear story after story of how love seeks to overcome grief and fear, doubts, and despair. We are invited to see God working through the hard things in life with an eye to rewriting the struggle with glimmers of extravagant love. A grown man on his knees smelling the daffodils feels like an apt reminder that God's story of hope and love is woven into the very fabric of creation. Our journey is learning to see and to align ourselves with that wonder both in how we live in the world, and how we look at our own lives. Yet we all know that this may be one of the hardest things we will ever learn to do. The external world is full of so many distractions and challenges; and our internal world isn’t much different. We can struggle with our willingness to believe that God loves us and thinks that we’re amazing just as we are, to think that a resurrection life if for us and our dark places and the even the struggles of the world.
The flowers bloom, and we sing hallelujah, and we see people bending down to appreciate life, and maybe we can hear God inviting us into the next season for our lives and our world where God imagines always greater things ahead of us. It’s interesting that the church season knows that this is hard to imagine, hard to believe – like a resurrection would be hard to imagine – and so we are given 50 days of stories to remind us. Of course, when that season is done, we’ll get another season of stories to remind us of another aspect of God's wonder and love inviting us to get on our knees and breath deep of God's spirit.
Alleluia, and Amen!
The Season of Pentecost will begin May 19th and then the next week we will shift to our summer schedule from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend with one service at 9:00 a.m. Last year the congregation loved having the chance to reconnect with people that they might not usually see because of going to different services. People appreciated the change of rhythm.
In the next months there are lots of opportunities to lean into God's proclamation of new life – some are described in the following pages, some will be discussed in upcoming bulletins and tidings: Family Promise, our Community Meal, a summer meal program, Habitat for Humanity, a wilderness canoe trip, VBS… each may be an opportunities to discern how God may be inviting us to share in living God's love in ever deeper ways.