Photo from water.org
Beloved:
He’s exhausted but cannot sleep, hungry but cannot swallow, fussy but cannot stand to be held. Nothing in this world is as difficult as being two-years-old and sick. He has Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease, which is a big name for such a common virus. His baby sister hasn’t gotten it yet, but his older sister and mama have. His grandmother has my so-far-unspotted fingers crossed that it passes me by. That my grandkids picked up this hateful little bug at one of the two lovely pre-schools they attend is evidence of their family’s privilege in this world. My heart hurts for grandmothers the world over nursing their own darlings who get so sick and sometimes die of all manner of virus and infection for no greater reason than a lack of clean water and access to cheap, lifesaving treatment. Meanwhile, others are on the couch in jammies, watching Bluey and slurping one popsicle after another. The world is unfair to its very core. I want to believe people are doing their best. I'm a better person, pastor, friend and neighbor when I behave as if I believe it. And yet, the evidence leaves me doubting. When kids die for want of powdered Gatorade (see article above) somebody in charge of a system somewhere is not doing the best they can. It certainly cannot be a supply chain problem, given the ease with which drugs and guns find their way into the same places. (Simply google “arms trade in _________” and pick your country. It’s quite the rabbit hole.) When Jesus’ helpers, now known as church, wanted kids out of the way, Jesus said, absolutely not. What he actually said was, "Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” Immediately after which, an apparently deaf person ran up to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to inherit eternal life?” So Jesus gave him an even more difficult answer than “Try to move through this world like a child in want of a blessing.” Clean water, IV hydration, Gatorade and popsicles surely count as blessings for millions of desperately sick kids in this world today. People and systems, grandmothers included, dedicated to delivering them fulfill the commandment of Jesus in Matthew 19, whether they describe themselves so or not. Prayers for every sick kid and every grown up caring for them today. ~peace and prayers, pastor annette Don’t forget we are celebrating Rob Drummond and his thirty years of service at UBC this Sunday, October 11. If you are local (or even if you are not), we hope you will attend the worship service (10:45 AM) and luncheon afterwards. For more information, contact the UBC church office, [email protected].
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Beloved:
What a treat to wear the sheep sweatshirt I ordered last spring that didn’t come until it was too hot to wear it. Wet and cool is not usually my favorite weather but I’ll take it. Everything in my flower bed and pots looks plush after the soaking of these past two nights. This turn of season is always bittersweet for me. I love the fall but will miss the time in my yard, at the pool and in lawnchair visits with the neighbors. We all hole up like bears once cold sets in. Of course I’ll read and sew more, which is also fun, if a bit more lonely. Still I wouldn’t trade this house, this yard, this neighborhood, this life for any other. To quote Mary Poppins, it’s practically perfect in every way. I’d have gladly skipped the sorrows, but no one does. What a blessing that healing comes in the standard package. Others I know are in the midst of struggle and sorrow, unsure of how things will turn out, or when. I’ve been there – in the waiting and the wishing I could do something to force the situation forward. But systems move in their own time. Hearts and minds soften or change in their own time. Just like the seasons, autumn always comes. Resolution and healing too. In the meantime of it all, may we stay in each other’s prayers. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette September 15, 2026 Beloved: We’ve an odd phenomenon around our patch of the neighborhood. All the squirrels have disappeared, and not a few chipmunks. No one’s seen any for nearly two weeks. The prime suspects are two foxes we’ve seen roaming about and napping on various porches. If they are catching squirrels and chipmunks, they’re leaving no trace – no bones or pelts in anybody’s yards, just speculation for our evening driveway conversations. Maybe the squirrels just moved away for some fatter, sweeter acorn harvest. Still, all of them? Even this guy, who empties my squirrel-proof birdfeeder every time I fill it. 
Or it could be the pair of hawks we’ve seen surveying the ground from the ridge of our backyard neighbor’s roof. Again, no evidence they’ve caught anything save the absence of the usual sciuridae around these parts. In the meantime, I’ll just keep blowing the thousands of acorns off my driveway into my yard, should they choose to return.
I actually only realized it when my neighbor pointed it out a few days ago. Now I wonder what else I haven’t noticed. In my yard, or maybe in my heart. What scarcity or loss has my own busy-ness effected? What delight or meaning am I missing because of grief, fear or anxiety I am not willing to release? Even though they drive me positively crazy sometimes and even though the fox and hawk must eat, I don’t want to live in a world without squirrels, and chipmunks too I suppose. So I hope they come back; and I promised myself I’d start this day differently – by catching up with myself and paying better attention to my own heart and mind. Not everything on this ridiculous to-do list next to me is going to get done today, so I need not nurse the feeling that it should. Instead I’ll neither hurry nor dawdle, as the saying goes, and pay attention along the way to what is going on around and within me. I pray a gentle day for you as well. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette 
September 1, 2026
Beloved: Wendell Berry died. I’ve been tearful since I read the news this morning. No more stories from Port William. No more essays or interviews. I’m a better preacher and a better person for having read him. I’d like to think I am a better writer, but I know for sure I am more at home in my own writing voice because of him. Good writers write about the places, people and work they know, he said. It’s why he wrote from rural Kentucky, his home and people. About agriculture, the work his people had done for generations – a way of life being plowed under by technology and corporate greed. Southern Indiana and east central Kentucky are of one topography and as far as I know we weren’t related. But the kinship I feel to the people in Berry’s stories is palpable. They could be the aunts and uncles at my own childhood family gatherings – throwing horseshoes and shelling peas, drinking store brand pop from a galvanized tub of ice. The men drank whiskey on the sly. My elders were not farmers, but all of them had grown up farming in and around Lawrence County. An older cousin married into a dairy farming family up in Brazil, and she’d take us little kids to see the newborn calves and get ice cream from the freezer barn. Most went to trade school or joined the military and got jobs at which they could make a living. I had uncles who were truck drivers and an aunt who tended lots of greenhouses. Only in my generation did cousins begin going off to college – to become teachers, engineers and nurses, along with a fancy environmental scientist who lives in Europe and one very ordinary preacher. From this spot on the earth I understand everything I know about this life, this world, and my faith. Among these people I first experienced family, community and church. And from Wendell Berry I learned to embrace it all for the gift it is, and to glean the stories from which to make meaning of my own life, honoring them as the only truthful stories I can tell as well as the stories only I can tell. His memory will forever be a blessing to me. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette 
August 18, 2026
Beloved: My house is wide open to this morning’s deliciously mild air. I’d love to spend the day fussing over my flowers, staking the zinnias that have collapsed under their own weight. But emails, projects and people are today’s responsibilities. Maybe a walk with Birdy in the afternoon. Two billy goats boarded a bus in Portland, Oregon and were shooed off by other passengers. A cottonmouth hid out in the helmet of a high school football player in Arkansas. He practiced a good while when a teammate saw the snake’s head poking out of the helmet earhole. Snake and player escaped unharmed. A truly good person and beloved IU professor emeritus of religious studies passed away at age 92. Two adopted girls from India lived 100 miles apart in The Netherlands and became friends as teenagers when they met at camp. Years later in adulthood they discover they are sisters. The headlines have just been too much for me, so lately I’ve been skipping to the sweet news first. And the ordinary news of people living their quotidian lives which, as Donna Ritter* used to say, is funnier, sadder and more interesting than anything that ever happens in a movie or a book. It sets me in a better state of mind for reading about wars and government corruption, reminding me that even in these times there is cause for hope, and joy, and lightness of heart. Headlines’ Despair is real ~ that hopeless helplessness that feels like a backpack full of rocks carried through our days when bad news fills our brains. Scarcely do we notice at first, the steady drip-drip of that hopelessness into our spirits, until we are paralyzed in faith as well, believing we can do nothing meaningful to push back against the corruption of the day. Reading the side columns is not just a feel-good exercise, friends, but the flexing of our faith. From hope and joy flows the courage and strength required to serve and build the better world for which all good people long. These are the stories that remind us we are not alone, that the world is full of people watching out for one another (and the billy goats) and calling us to join them in the repair of the world. I pray this day finds you light of heart, full of joy and leaning into the hope we have in Christ Jesus! ~ peace & prayers, Pastor annette * Donna Ritter was a long-time member of UBC who loved opera and literature and eating out. She had lots of kids, lots of books, and little formal education, and she taught me more about ministry than most of my seminary professors. Note: * Come visit our table at Bloomington Pride downtown this Saturday, August 22nd. 
Beloved:
First day back from a delightful time away from email and all things church. I slept a lot, sewed a lot, spent a lot of time with grandkids, took a little trip with my sister, gardened and did some house projects. I enjoyed it all and am grateful for the time to rest my brain, body and spirit. My garden plot is really coming on. I’ve put up a dozen jars of pesto and picked bowls of cherry tomatoes two mornings in a row. I have bouquets worth of zinnias on the stem and two bell peppers on the vine. My herbs are exploding, so let me know if you want some oregano, chives or thyme. The squirrel just showed up to check the feeders he already emptied a few nights ago, so instead he’s chewing a nub of tree branch. Behind him, workers are laying straw wattles (I had to look up the proper term) in my neighbor’s and my backyards. They’re planting grass seed over the area they dug up two weeks ago to lay drainage tile. I’m more hopeful than optimistic that they’ll be back to water what they’ve planted, else we will have our own muddy river every time it rains. Alas, not everything is mine to fret over. Ever am I startled that the world can be so calm in one spot and so chaotic in another. People the world over can only fantasize about a neighborhood so peaceful and quiet, where it’s safe to sit outside and gardens are a memory. And not just oceans away, of course, sometimes merely streets. In cities big and small, including our own. Why should I be so fortunate while others know only hardship and struggle? It doesn’t always come down to choices and hard work. I don’t work half as hard as the single mom who works at Walmart and also drives for Grub-Hub. No one chooses where they’re born: suburban North America or Gaza. I go months at a time not worrying that a hellcat missile will hit my children’s houses or my church, yet grandmothers and pastors in Palestine think about it every day. Which is to say that while I am indeed and ever so grateful for this safe and peaceful life, I also try to sit lightly with it, knowing it is so very, very fragile. We are all susceptible to the disasters, storms and tragedies that fall upon a person or a community in the twinkling of an eye. Life itself is unfragile – unsusceptible, that is – to the disasters that befall us. According to the faith within us and we share. Given freely by the Christ to us all without respect to our fortunes in this world. This is my comfort and my courage every day, most especially on the hard ones. Summer is not quite winding down, but I can feel it coming. I pray your hearts and hands and mind are well occupied this day. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette 
July 21, 2026
Beloved, It’s time to give my basil plants a deep pruning and make some pesto before they bolt much more. I’ll get another crop or two before I let it go for the season. Tomatoes are on the vine but none are even close to ripe. I’ll pick jalapeños soon, and my zinnias are gorgeous. Gardening and sewing are the two things quieting my mind this summer. Only as I leave that quiet zone do I realize how busy my brain stays nearly all the time, even when I’m sleeping. I regularly wake up from dreams in which I’m trying madly to finish a project or meet some people’s expectations. I don’t like waking up relieved to be relieved of the busyness of sleep. I like working too, writing, reading, meetings, corresponding, planning, and my visitation rounds. I just don’t like how much mental space and energy even joyful work consumes. Which I suppose is why touching dirt and growing things, or stitching hundreds of tiny pieces of fabric together is so restorative. What’s happening at my fingertips requires my concentration but the stakes are very low; starvation doesn’t drive my gardening and no one dies because my quilt blocks are crooked. I’m in it for the process and the gifts therein. If only I brought this nugget in from the garden and out of my sewing room. If only I imagined myself, in this time and place, here for the process and for the gifts therein, less than the expected, hoped-for outcomes I attach to all this labor. If only I was as willing to work as methodically and patiently at everything as I am in the garden and the sewing room. What is it about being in a hurry that suggests to me I’m working harder or doing a better job, especially when that pace exhausts me so and leaves me dodging the work rather than returning to it joyfully? Who is whispering such nonsense in my ear, so persistently that it takes root in my thoughts? Habit, I suppose, a long habit of believing work always comes before fun, before joy, that the two are naturally antonymous. A hard lesson to unlearn for sure, but in the practice I feel it softening. For that I am grateful. It smells like a put-out campfire inside my house this morning.* I hope you & yours are safe & well. ~peace and prayers, pastor annette *Canadian campfires, I assume, as nothing in my neighborhood is burning. July 14, 2026
“Whose grandma are you?” demanded the tiny barefoot girl the moment I waited for my grandgirl to be ready. Twice more by other kids, “Who are you here to pick up?” Not a smile among them. It felt more like a security checkpoint than the preschool classroom I’ve been in and out of since 1994. Turns out these kids had just joined this class from another as the school rearranges age groups. They’d interrogated adults all day, matching us to their playmates. Amazing, I thought. All this time I assumed that a room full of 3, 4 and 5 year-olds were ignoring me, when in fact they were silently keeping track of who belonged to whom. What else are they tracking, I wonder, what other data is being organized and filed in those tiny brains when all we see are kids painting and playing dress-up? They feel safer knowing who that mama, daddy, grandma, grandpa is and to which friend they belong. I feel safer when I know who is in my space and why. I also love how their enquiry designates the classroom as their domain, not mine. I am a guest, my presence there conditional on whose grandma I am.* Community is everything to us, isn’t it, from the time we begin realizing we share the world with other humans. The members of a strong community, like a preschool classroom, protect each other and their bond of belonging. They have a healthy suspicion of outsiders and practice the clear boundary-setting we adults pay therapists to teach us. They are welcoming once connection is established. I can learn so much from them for my own grown-up life, where I can be so hesitant – so afraid, that is – to tell the truth when it comes to belonging for me. Simply, the tribe I want to be part of is a tribe of people chasing the ways of Jesus, in study and in practice, enjoying this life and working together, grateful for the preciousness of being alive for such tender moments as when a 4-year-old Chinese girl asks me for some identification. I pray you have time with your people today and are strengthened by it. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette * I thought it hilarious and not a bit startling that I was immediately recognized as a grandma. I am working on embracing this identity. Beloved, I’ve been thinking about my grout, the concrete stuff that holds tile in place and gets dirtier the more it’s mopped. I’ve owned three different houses over the past thirty years, all of which had tile, and not once have I cleaned grout. The house I now own is more than 30 years old and I can say with some confidence the grout has never been cleaned as it’s black throughout the kitchen save the pantry floor where it’s a nice creamy beige. When we decide to clean something really dirty we say we are going to tackle it, which is how I spent a good part of my holiday weekend, tackling my grout. Like Brother Lawrence peeling his potatoes, the tedium of running my $10 electric scrubber back and forth in that narrow road between each tile became almost meditative, allowing me to think about absolutely nothing. Rarely can I think about nothing. Of course I am nothing like Brother Lawrence. I complain and procrastinate and am so easily distracted by all the projects I have going in this house. I do my best to forgive myself, to tell myself the mess is all my own, that it bothers no one else. Besides, I finish things all the time, just not as fast as I start new things. My simple point is this, framing our daily existence as trying to catch up cannot possibly be the life God intends for us, can it? Two baskets of laundry and stacks of dishes to be put away do not fit my idea of abundant life. But somehow mindlessly soaping, scrubbing and wiping away thirty-plus years of homemade alluvium is next level happiness for me. I fully expect to die with projects still spread out on my desk and sewing table, with unfinished books all over my house and dirty window sills I’ve been meaning to clean since last fall, or maybe the fall before that. And hopefully my grout will have turned black all over again. Because I was busy NOT fretting about what wasn’t done but enjoying what each day offered. Of course it’s far easier to write about than to practice, which is why it is called practice. Like Brother Lawrence said. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette 
Beloved:
Birdy is always beside herself to get outside first thing in the morning. Partly to take care of her business but mostly to greet the walkers. Not a few stop to love on her and she knows who has treats in their pockets. But one early morning last week a new friend was waiting at the end of our driveway. A mallard drake – standing still and looking around. I pulled up a chair to watch him do positively nothing for ten minutes but look around and take a step or two in this or that direction. No cars came by the whole time. Birdy, named such because she is a golden retriever bred for retrieving waterfowl by the by, took zero notice of A DUCK in the middle of the street not twenty feet from where she lay. Eventually a mallard hen waddled out of my neighbor’s shrubs and the two of them waddled a few yards down the street before taking wing over the rooftops. They haven’t returned as far as I know and there’s no nest across the street. Maybe they were house hunting. Maybe she needed time to herself after an argument. Clearly he was waiting for her, patiently. There’s always something to see, said my friend Jon, when I told him about the duck visit. We were talking about nature and the blessing it is to go outside and just look. When I visit him we usually sit in the same spot where there’s always something new to see: something blooming, something fading, car windows down in the pouring rain, a cardinal in the lilac bushes, a woman working circles around the men on a roofing crew, a lady riding her personal mobility scooter in the street waving at folks like she’s in a parade. All for free to anyone and everyone willing to slow down even for a minute; slow down and take in the offerings extended to us as we pass through time and space. We get this one trip through this world – sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years. The days are long and the years are short is one of the truest phrases I know. There is so much I will never see, I certainly don’t want to miss what is right in front of me, the lovely and the hurtful. Each sharpens the other and we are better people for the sharpening. As you move through these sweltering days, I pray you stay safe and that, whatever comes your way, you face it with the hope and courage given us by this faith we claim. ~ 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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October 2026
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