Beloved:

    My hummingbird feeders positively buzz with business from daylight to dusk.  Seems like they’d be on their way south by now but at least two dozen were swarming my deck this morning.  They are also really fat, fatter than they’ve been all summer, and so I did a bit of reading.

    Turns out, these most likely aren’t my usual friends at all, but rather migrants headed south from Canada whose journey started weeks ago.  I like thinking they started out at my friend Takouhi’s house in Montreal.  They fly twenty miles a day.  This time next week they’ll be across the Ohio River, maybe slurping juice from my friend Gwenie’s feeders in Louisville and a month after that then another friend, Charlotte, can feed them from her Atlanta deck.  

    I love, love, love imagining my porch is a pin on the tiny mental maps which guide their routes in spring and fall.  The article says if I don’t put out feeders next year I’ll probably be erased from their memory and they won’t even stop by in 2019.  But if I keep my feeders out I’ll remain on their routes their whole lifetimes, maybe their children’s too.  All for the price of sugar water and two mason jars.  So much amazingness right outside my window!

    While the air is shimmery fall in Indiana, friends and neighbors in other states are still sweeping up and counting blessings after recent hurricanes.  My daughter is headed back to school safe and sound after evacuating Savannah for Atlanta several days ago.  I’m grateful to friends who took her in without a second thought.  I look forward to being with you again this Sunday morning. 

Beloved:

         My suitcase is officially in storage. The patio tomato plants are winding down.  A second wave of garden tomatoes is coming on.  The college junior is piling her boxes and furniture in the garage to haul to Savannah this weekend while the man-son races about getting vaccines and visas in order, for his year abroad in Taiwan.  Besides that, the air smells different than two weeks ago ~ what was green grass is now brown leaves.   

         I love summer and would be sad to see it pass except for how much I also love the first half of fall.  The short dark days of November and December I love because I knit more and wear pajamas more hours of the day.  Then it’s winter, when the chicken water freezes and the hens don’t lay many eggs.  But we get to wear sweaters and eat chili for supper.  Then the days start lasting longer and the daffodil bulbs push through and it’s back to the nursery for garden plants again.  

         In June I never think about winter; but when the seasons change, every season is on my mind at once, as well as every season I have lived till now.  How is it I am fifty-three years old?  In college I imagined fifty-three and seventy-five were practically next door neighbors.  At forty I knew better.  At fifty-three I realize I was right in college after all.  The years may be short but none of them is ever lost.  All fifty-three of them are always with me here and now.  Each new turn of season is every turn of season I’ve ever known before.  On the breeze of my fifty-third is the scent of my twenty-second and my seventh too.  I am every age I’ve ever been, when the Indiana leaves begin to fall.  What a precious life this is!  I pray this note finds you full of gratitude for another day to be alive.

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Beloved:

    A white Baptist preacher was doing his part in the Civil Rights Movement when he came to think his place wasn’t with the movement proper but with the white supremacists on the other side of town.  This news was not well received by his politically like-minded white friends (read liberals), but he believed Jesus had sent him.  So to the KKK meeting places he did carry himself to preach the gospel as he knew it.  Those folks were about as receptive as he thought they’d be, which wasn’t very, so the preacher ended up pretty lonely all around.  Except for being smack dab in the middle of God’s will which, as the missionaries of my childhood said, is always the very safest place to be.  I was grown before I knew the word safest means something altogether different to missionaries than to my fourteen-year-old self.  

    I took Brother to a Dragonfly off my shelf again hoping for some clarity in these days.  It did not disappoint.  Only humans do such terrible things to each other, Will Campbell wrote.  To make things right, we have to recognize the humanity in the terrorist as well as the terrorized.  Apart from life in Christ I have no idea how to begin.  A modern preacher reminded me this week that the wisest of us is never better than half right about the ways of God.  I should be so wise.  Our best hope is to pray, then pray some more.  Then hold hands and tell the truth with more humility than usual.  

    It’s raining, finally.  What a gift.  I pray the day finds you full of hope and courage as we seek to be his people.  

~peace and prayers,
pastor annette

Beloved:

     So very glad to be back at work after a lovely three weeks of vacation.  I joined my husband in Seoul, South Korea for two weeks then came back to Bloomington for a few days and spent the last weekend with all the kids at my daughter’s house in Cincinnati.

     On the very first day of vacation I got some not-so-amazing chicken salad in the Detroit airport.   Thankfully I ate it on the plane, so the food poisoning didn’t strike until a few hours after I landed in Seoul.  Then again, forty-eight hours later, it struck for real.  Carl’s Korean students got me to Dr. Yoo, a wonderful English-speaking doctor who ever so kindly shepherded me through an entirely different and far less complicated healthcare system.  I bounced right back and had a great time roaming a foreign city by myself and eating amazing food.  I went to parks and museums and markets and a martyr’s shrine.  I read lots of books, took lots of naps, knitted, quilted, gardened and played with my dogs.  I tried (and failed!) not to read the news, so I had to pray and journal and breathe deeply more than should be required on vacation but to a good end all the same.

     This week’s passage is Acts 17:16-34, should you care to read ahead.  Bible Chat will meet on Thursday at its regularly scheduled time.  I’ll be away from the office this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday & Wednesday) to attend services for Vaughn Delong.  My heart just aches for Nate and Nick and Julia as they tell their daddy good-bye.  What comfort they will have in being so well fathered by a man who loved and served the Lord as Vaughn did.  I look forward to seeing you on Sunday morning.  

​~ peace & prayers,
​pastor annette
​

     Hakyoung attended Global Women’s Gathering when her husband was a student at IU ​in 2014-2015.
We had a wonderful evening and dinner with her family at their home in Seoul.  Sweet!

     ​How many others passed on by, left him for dead, if they noticed him at all?  Who has the time or the stomach to collect a bloody squirrel and take it home to tend?  Did she go to CVS for squirrel-size gauze and tape?  Did her husband roll his eyes or glove up and pet the squirrel while she washed his wounds?  Did she crush half an Advil for his pain?  Is she worried for him now?

     I’m no vet but the squirrel seemed in pretty bad shape to me.  I suspect he’s not long for this world.  Yet I am full of hope, triggered by a tiny swatch of gauze and tape.  I am so prone to assume, more often than not, that people are jerks.  Nope.  More often than any of us ever know, human beings are amazingly kind, generous and tenderhearted.  They notice the very weakest and most broken creatures among us, and go out of their way to help.  They spend their time and money healing up wee calamities of this life together called creation and we are all the better for it, whether we know it or not.  Just seeing a squirrel with a taped-up tail left me loving people just a little more.  So thank you, neighbor, for that gift.  I pray the day treats you to something just as lovely and full of hope.  

~peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Beloved:  

    It’s high noon by the clock and dark as night out my office window.  It rained so hard my Honda Fit bobbed as much as drove to the airport this morning.  Carl left to teach in Seoul for a month.  I’m meeting him there in two weeks for my vacation.  When I return it will be time to help Ben pack for his study abroad year in Taipei.  No time flies like the summertime, and this year has been a near perfect balance of sunshine and rain on everything growing at my place.  Even the chickens are thriving ~ all those extra worms maybe.

    As a kid I thought summer rain meant the day was ruined.  We might get to go to the library, but otherwise it was indoors only - no riding our bikes to Thornton Park or playing in the woods.  When I was eleven or twelve, my mom might drop me off at the library if I found a friend to go too.  I was literally grown up and gardening before I understood Matthew 5:45:

“. . . . . so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven;
for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good,
and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

   I was grown up and gardening before I understood that I’m supposed to see God blessing the bullies ~ not chastening the faithful.  Biblical writers didn’t know a world with too much rain.  Rain is life-giving, life-restoring.  “In Israel every drop of water is precious” is a saying still repeated in Israel.  Their most advanced technology is dedicated to catching, moving and reusing rainwater.  

   “Has anyone written the book, When Good Things Happen to Bad People?” I wondered.  Yes, as it turns out.  The Amazon description calls it an irreverent, fast-paced, fact-filled compendium of fifty case studies of notorious villains from Attila the Hun to Dick Cheney.  Hmm, not exactly the theological reflection I had in mind.  Maybe because it isn’t complicated to understand, only to believe and practice.

   Jesus loves the little children . . . . . .all the children of the world . . . .

   We know it.  We’ve always known it.  Before we knew lots of other things, we knew that.  And yet it is so hard to know on dark and rainy days, days when we feel confined and overwhelmed at the same time, days we want to sleep and sleep and sleep.  I pray this gorgeously green and sparkling day finds you positively dripping with new life!

~ peace and prayers,
pastor annette

​Beloved:

    Indoors ~ For four days a horsefly harassed me in my very own kitchen, buzzing incessantly and dive-bombing my head.  Day One I ignored him, thinking he’d die naturally soon enough.  Turns out horseflies can live up to two months!  Days Two and Three I stalked him with a swatter, but he was fast and never landed.  Finally this morning, Day Four, he was clearly tired.  He flew slower and kept landing on the window screen.  I pretended not to notice for a long time and then BAM!  He’s chicken scraps and my kitchen is peaceful again.  

    Outdoors ~ My twine plan to keep chickens out seems to be working so far, but then again no tomatoes are ripe red yet.  A butternut squash plant is completely out of control and has taken over way too much ground.  I’ve run it up a ladder and along the fence for now.  I’ve picked basil and squash already and will have cucumbers by the weekend.  Lots of green tomatoes on the vine and the blackberries are turning but not yet soft enough to harvest.  Flowers are lush all around.

    After weeks of not being home even when I am at home, I finally feel caught up indoors and out.  The last two days I’ve cleaned and cooked and shopped and sorted and settled down into this time and place called my house, and every creature living here is the better for it.  We finally have soap and shampoo and toilet paper again; loads of healthy food and popsicles and diet coke.  Nothing nasty grows in the fridge and the pantry isn’t creepy anymore.  I spent $18 on what amounts to an electric broom that sucks up dog hair like a dream.  Worth the joy at twice the price! 

    Being at home in my house does not come to me as naturally as I wish it did.  By my wishing and regrets I’m forever prone to be somewhere other than here and now ~ in all the amazing beauty, bounty and light of my house on this perfect summer day.  When I have the patience and the wisdom to do the tasks my own house requires, I cannot help but be here now.  Not only is keeping my house good for my heart and brain and soul, I wonder if everyone keeping their respective house might be good for the collective human heart and soul.  I’m remembering a book by Kathleen Norris called The Quotidian Mysteries, and the sanctifying possibilities of everyday work.  Maybe we’d all be less afraid, slightly less stressed out, if we took Matthew 6:34 to heart.  My favorite translation is from J.B. Phillips:  “Don’t worry at all then about tomorrow.  Tomorrow can take care of itself!  One day’s trouble is enough for one day.”

peace & prayers, friends, peace & prayers,
​~ pastor annette

Construction noise is louder than highway traffic but, like the dogs, I hardly notice either anymore, until I drive to town.  Indiana countryside, field and forest mainly, has been turned to rubble made of limestone and red clay.  The hammers pound boulders into rocks (thus the name), to load and haul them somewhere else.  I hear the stones hit steel and the back-up beeping as dump trucks pull away.  Twelve, thirteen hours a day they work right now to maximize June’s daylight.  The newspapers tell no end of the complaining, broken contracts and budget overruns.  They say the whole project is now years behind schedule.  All the same, a road is coming into view. 

I’d like to ask an expert to explain the difference between art and engineering.  Are new roads as beautiful drawn on paper as when laid upon the earth?  The math alone must have cost a thousand pencils!  For all the bother and delay, it’s wonderful to watch these workers work and imagine their pride in building something so useful as a road. 

I’m not so naïve I don’t know the purpose of this road is to make rich people richer.  But all the same it still reminds me that we can do most anything we set our minds on doing, anything to which we apply this gift of God called human imagination.  We can now catch the wind and sunlight.  I have a jacket made of soda bottles.  Some Indiana farmers I know grow a special strain of corn [see www.bhrp.org] and ship it to the world’s poorest people who thrive on it even if they have nothing else to eat.  Talk about whole food!  Once upon a time each was a person’s idea, a dream.  Amazing!  I pray this beautiful day offers you the space to nurse the ideas in your own heart and mind. 

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

And a Recipe:  Something new and yummy I’m eating this summer is spinach, water-melon, red onion, feta cheese salad.  In a big bowl use about equal parts spinach and watermelon, a generous dump of feta, onion slivers and only a tablespoon or so of oil.  Mix it up and let it sit in the fridge a few hours.  Stir the salty, watermelony, slightly oniony runoff back over the spinach and eat a big pile of it.  Summertime for your mouth!

Beloved:

One family rode their bikes to church on Sunday.  Their kids’ heads smelled like sunshine when I hugged them.  I’ve got tiny tomatoes on the vine.  I picked a batch of basil and stirred it into a salad.  My whole kitchen smelled like summertime.  Southern Indiana is so beautiful in June, sometimes it hurts my eyes.

I think it such a precious thing to be living now in the same place I was a child.  Alone in my yard I sometimes fall out of time and am not sure if I’m eight years old or fifty-three.  Not because I’m senile (yet!) but because the air and light and scent are acutely familiar.  My eight-year-old self  didn’t know she loved being by herself outside:  reading a book, swinging, doing nothing.  I didn’t know I was happy.  I was just a kid whose mom said, “Go outside and play!” – to which I never once answered, Thank you for this most perfect gift.

I’ll thank her every June, July and August morning left to me.  Picking berries and carrying weeds to the ditch.  Dragging water hoses and loading the birdfeeders.  Plucking off the tomato worms and filling up the egg basket.  Knowing it was always her idea, that I go out and play.  And a gift from heaven, I suppose, to move away, then end up back here after all.
​
I like thinking about how all over the world, in places as different as can be from here, people are just as much at home as I am here among these green hills, below this blue sky, where crickets and frogs sing each other to sleep as I write.  Wherever home is for you – a place or a person or maybe a memory – I pray you have a moment there sometime soon.  

These are a few pics from my playground these last few days.
1.) Chicken wearing a hydrangea bonnet  
2.) Annabelle hydrangea in peak bloom ~ same as on the Communion table this past Sunday
3.) Lungwort and lemon balm taking over
4.) Yellow squash plants
5.) Licorice Anise smells amazing!

​Beloved:
​
Sunday afternoon I collapsed and I really didn’t move much until Tuesday morning when I decided to stay home and spend the day to catch up with myself.  Yesterday I stayed home all day to catch up with myself and am a new person today for it. A hundred thank you’s to my colleague, Elder Wanda Hosea, for introducing me to this phrase.  We were leaving a meeting and she tossed off the phrase, “Well, I’m going home to catch up with myself.”  I didn’t ask her what she meant, but dropped the phrase in my pocket all the same.

Last week was Vacation Bible School, you see – the one week in the year I work about 70 hours (which I know some people work every week - blessings be upon you!) and never see the inside of my office or my kitchen at home.  For 70 hours I mostly cook and clean and shop and clean and play with kids and clean.  I laugh a lot and enjoy my job and these people altogether.  I don’t do anything but VBS the whole week long, and I love, love, love, love it.  I’m also thrilled when it’s over, at which time I collapse for about 40 straight hours.  Then I get up and catch up with myself.

Other believers talk about their centering practice or centering prayer.  I think they mean something like catching up with myself, but I also imagine them as profoundly spiritual people sitting cross-legged on the floor thinking no thoughts, just inhaling silence and exhaling calm.  People who, when they are active, speak of quotidian practices and finding meaning in the ordinary.