 Beloved:
We still do Vacation Bible School and we still call it vacation Bible school. It’s way out of style for cool churches, but I just can’t let it go. Crafts and games and Bible stories. Snacks and songs and so many hugs. Every inch of our building will be sticky. We’ll run out of band-aids, trash bags and toilet paper. For weeks after, we’ll find forgotten shoes and leftover crafts and be too exhausted to haul away the recycling. And I’d need a whole other heart to love it any more. I love how hard this little congregation works to put this on for twenty-odd kids. I love how our directors now whip a theme together like a baker makes a pie. I love our new partnership with Red Door Church and all it brings to this occasion. I love how loved all these little ones don’t even know they are. They are just having so much fun. I love watching kids grow up one week a year for years and years and years. Our VBS teen helpers now were once our preschool class. I love how low-budget our program is – how our big investment is the time and energy kindness requires. The VBS offering this year goes to the Monroe County Community Kitchen Summer Lunch Program, which provides free sack lunch every day of summer for kids who qualify for free lunch at school. It’s pretty cool, and UBC’er Vicki Pierce is the CK Executive Director. If you aren’t involved in VBS and want to give to the offering, just send checks to church with CK VBS Offering in the memo. We will also collect a VBS offering in service this coming Sunday, June 16th. Finally, if you are in town, please come eat with us on Friday night at 6 PM – Friday Pizza Fellowship for VBS families, workers, UBC congregation and guests, pretty much anyone who wants to come. We’re just eating together and relaxing after a sweet week. Hope to see you!
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Speaking of seeds, the chickens are confined to the coop now, save the last hour of daylight when my sprinklers are on. They’ve taken to digging up every seed I plant and tossing the un-tasty ones all around the garden. I’ve gathered and replanted beans three times! They really hate the sprinklers, and seem unable to figure out how it rains in just one spot of the yard. So much entertainment, most of which is free.
I’ll have to birdwatch in the morning for the rest of the week because VBS work starts tomorrow! Plans are pretty well in hand but we can always use more workers. Please come to church Wednesday and/or Thursday between 12 and 5 pm, wearing your favorite work clothes. We’ll move and make and paint as Rob and Erika instruct. VBS proper begins on Monday and here’s the link to sign kids up https://vbspro.events/p/events/vbsatubc or share with friends you want to invite. It is one of the best things we do. The aching beauty of these days bears witness to the gentle beauty God would have us carry and convey to one another. I pray you recognize the invitation as you go today. Also, some craft items we need for VBS you might have around your house; drop off at church any time this week:
got the cattle feed tubs for free so you can imagine how excited we are to get started.
Once upon an anniversary, cheapo gardening would not have been my first choice for celebrating. Now I can’t imagine anything more fun. What we do is so much less interesting than just being together. I love being roommates almost all the time. He cooks for me and laughs at almost all my jokes. Sometimes he sits by me when I have to do things that really stress me out. He’s known me a long, long time and gets offended on my behalf as a best friend should. He’s helped me grow and helped me be braver than I ever would be without him. Even when he drives me crazy, I am so grateful for him. Thirty-one years have flown by; the days have been amazing, awful, and everything in between. Death has dwindled the generations before us while the ones coming after just keep growing. Our lives have turned out richer than either of us would ever have thought to ask for. I’ve been too blessed to ask for anything, but in my heart of hearts I pray we might have another thirty-one or two, just to see what might come next. Be they spouse, cousin or best friend, they are God’s best gifts to us.
Maybe he is homeless. Maybe he’s a sociologist. I’ve decided he is the necessary prophet for such a time as this ~ simply inviting strangers to be kind and responding kindly no matter what. His name is Kevin. He has a ponytail and the prettiest brown-green eyes. Our two exchanges totaled no more than three minutes, but he’s the preacher I remember best from the Festival of Homiletics last week in downtown Minneapolis. More than anything, he was simply present where people are - the gentlest reminder that human beings are more kin than strangers. We only need look and see each other, right here, right now.
worship. Following our Church Council meeting, the Fellowship Committee will host a meal of Carl’s finest and a big cake to celebrate together Andy’s graduation from High School. Please come and enjoy this feast together as we celebrate this special occasion as a family.
You are so dear to me!
chickens. Last year they ate all my sunflowers and cucumbers before they even split their shells. I’m putting in oodles of tomatoes, enough to fill my freezer come September. And blackberries, of course. And squash and herbs and peppers. Carl says he’s growing beans, but I think beans too much trouble so I’ll get them at the farmer’s market.
Wow, do I love spring and summer - outdoors and indoors! We’ll keep having church, and I look forward to our summer worship. VBS is June 10-14! - one of my favorite times of year. We’ll work on our building some and share a few meals too. Lots of you will go on vacation and I’ll be here when you get back, ready with some preaching from Romans! I pray this gorgeous day is kind to you in every way. I’m going outside to dig now. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Beloved:
Another Holy Season is in the books. Jesus ascends to heaven, and we settle down to be the day-in, day-out church. A whole week after and I still have more adrenaline than interest in the work to be caught up. I wonder if the ancients had a practice for this strange transition, from urgent to eternity, such contrary states of mind. As we resume our more ordinary calendar of worship, prayer, and service, I am grateful for another year together. I’ll soon start preaching through Romans, if you want to read ahead. In the next few weeks we will have a wedding shower and a baby shower, and get Vacation Bible School ready to go. Another school year will wind up, and town will quiet down. Only God knows what the future holds for us, but I trust our life together will take the shape of kindness, justice and humility. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette This recipe came from a Nigerian chef at Tasty who described it as fast food ~ what his mom cooked when she didn’t feel like cooking. Ben and I have made it twice in two weeks. Chicken would work as well as beef. Fried plantains are so good! Nigerian Beef Stew Ingredients for 6 servings
For Fried Plantains - get two of the ripest plantains and slice into ¼-in. slices. Heat about 2 inches vegetable oil in heavy pan and fry slices a few at a time, turning them a couple of times. They fry fast. Drain on cooling rack and sprinkle with sea salt. April 16, 2019
Beloved: The journey into darkness is more difficult when Easter comes so late. Everything is so alive already! Lots of tulips opened yesterday and we are eating lettuce from my husband’s early crop. I cleaned out all my porch pots to ready them for planting and can hardly wait until May 6th, my self-imposed safe date for planting in the ground. All the same, Good Friday comes first. Its shame and sorrow are the context of Easter’s joy. Each requires the other be fully entered in. Yet they are not two stories but one, the story of Love’s willingness to walk through any fire and confront any power between that Love and us. Told in the smallest of ways, with words and songs and candles on Good Friday. With food and friends and music on Easter morning. Small, but not too small for our hearts to know what’s what. That we are loved by the Love that will never let us go. That life is therefore good and we have cause for joy! I look forward to worshipping with you Friday at 7 PM and Sunday morning at 9 AM. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette April 9, 2019
Beloved: The air outside is so sweet it practically hurts to be inside at a desk. The lovely consolation is, today’s inside work is fun: a wedding service and an easy-peasy letter of recommendation. Heidi, Chris and Kallie become an official family on Saturday, and Andy is after every college scholarship he can find. What a privilege to be invited into such joyful occasions! Pastoring is seasonal work, don’t you know, similar to farming. There’s work to do in every season of life, cradle to the grave with oh so many potlucks in between. Even the sadnesses are precious for all the love it takes to make things bittersweet. On the days this job drives me crazy I wouldn’t trade it for anything, which more than anything means it’s what I’m meant to do. For your part in this life together, I am grateful, for the gifts and labor that you bring and for the fellowship and ministry created and delivered, by which so many lives are sweetened and encouraged. I look forward to sharing the next few weeks of worship and joy with you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor Annette Saturday, April 13th Heidi & Chris get married at UBC Sunday, April 14th at 10:45 AM Palm Sunday Worship at UBC 4:00 PM Eastern Greene County Musical Theatre Production of The Little Mermaid, starring Andy & Emily, Eastern Greene Elementary School. Tickets at the door. Sunday, April 21st at 9:00 AM Easter Feast followed by Worship
As I turn it over in my mind, I remember a college minister shaking his head and saying, “Annette, you read too much.” Had he been the only minister I knew, I might have been broken-hearted but, instead, I just kept reading. Thirty-six years later I’ve come upon a new heartbreak. Even if my eyes hold out, I won’t live long enough to get through all I have left to read. I already barely do housework. I suppose I could hire a reader to do double time as I knit and sew. But then who will take notes? Can I afford a reader and a scribe? Posing yet another question and then another after that: Is it possible I read too much? That I might better spend my time? Or that I take too much pride in reading . . . or in these notebooks full of scribbles that no one on God’s green earth, including me most likely, will ever remotely care to read? Surely that’s just crazy thinking, for which the same college minister expressed concern: “Annette, you just think too much.” Maybe he’s right on both counts, after all. In any case, I’ll take my chances that he’s not, so long as my eyes hold out. And then I’ll find a reader, some young bibliophile upon whom the same spell is cast. They will read and I’ll drink tea, and we’ll talk books until my nap time comes around. If such a thing is even possible, then I know for sure that life only gets more grand. I pray you find some joy today! ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Books I have going these days: Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr The Hidden Life of Trees, Ben Wohlleben Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, Juli Berwald March 26, 2019
Beloved: The fruit comes late, wrote P.T. Forsyth, concerning prayer. The fruit comes last, actually, as it has to do with blackberries actually. I was checking my canes on the way to the henhouse yesterday. Nothing happening yet. Baby canes don’t get berries until their second year, so until these green I won’t know which ones will bear this year. The one-year-olds I’ll just prune all summer, lest they take the garden like Shelob’s lair. Prayer is mostly pre-fruit work. Waiting, rooting, growing, sun, rain, and patience. Pruning, pollination, buds. Flowers. Green berries. Red berries. Birds! Bird netting! Then, maybe, purple berries that get soft. For our yogurt, pie and jam. Every year the work’s the same, and every year ripe berries are a maybe. I’m still talking about prayer. Just like with the berries, it’s the praying that matters most – the tending and the patience to do so little for so long, even on days when nothing much is happening yet. This is the season of unseen movement; the growing is underground. Winter feels nearly over and Lent is halfway done. Do not fail to pray for one another, and I wish you much love today. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
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June 2019
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