It was not a good morning. I’m not sure if it was getting a flu shot yesterday, or finally succumbing to a cold that one of the kids brought home now that their schools are all back in-person, or both, but my head felt like it was in a vice. And I’m aching all over, as we’re trying to get our yard ready for some new grass that may well die in next summer’s heat.
And I didn’t watch last night’s presidential debate, but it sounds like it was as nasty a mudslinging match as anyone might have guessed. And as I walked into my office at Joy this morning, I found that my laptop had just started some very, very long updates. What timing!
And then just as I was about to write this, Sarah Smith handed me a draft of this very newsletter. And those pictures! And those thank you notes! I knew we had gotten many emails and notes of thanks and that we’d tried to take pictures of our God’s Work, Our Hands project, but nothing could prepare me for the reality of seeing them. I hope you have the same experience as you scroll down or turn to the next page.
In the second chapter of Phillipians you can almost hear Paul begging that community: “If there is ANY encouragement in Christ, ANY consolation from love, ANY compassion and sympathy…” From these pictures and notes it is clear that we as a community have not just any of these things, but all of them and in great quantities.
Paul goes on to connect our need for humility with Jesus Christ’s choice to humble himself on the cross, and indicates that this is what enables us to do good to and for one another. You’ll find challenging words in this newsletter: a call to refill our food pantry collection box, a reminder that our next virtual host week for Family Promise is right around the corner, a word about pursuing racial justice from our synod’s Building Bridges task force.
Maybe it’s too much to ask of us to be of one mind on these things. But it is God’s heartbeat that underlies our own, God’s Spirit that brings us together (sometimes literally and these days, often virtually), and Christ’s obedience that inspires our own. May Christ’s sacrifice draw us closer, may God’s Spirit bring us together, even and especially when we can’t all be together physically, and may our hearts beat more and more together and in rhythm with God’s own heart for all God’s people.
