My email refuses to update, so I can’t straighten out my daughter’s college housing situation.  My banking app won’t load, so I can’t deposit my paycheck.  My laptop crashes every fifteen minutes.  A morning like this pushes me ever more firmly toward apostasy.*
 
Then again it is also a beautiful day outside.  My window is open for the first time in two weeks.  Bee balm, gladiolas and hydrangeas are blooming like crazy.  I pick yellow squash almost every day and this is going to be my best blackberry year since we moved into our house.  Galatians 5:13-18 is my preaching text this Sunday.  In part it reads,
“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing what you want.”  
I chose it awhile back particularly for 4th of July weekend, for considering the difference between the spiritual freedom we have in Christ and the patriotic freedom of our citizenship.  But I’m aware of an even more basic freedom this morning – the freedom to consider all that is true in this time and place:  the broken parts and the parts that work, the irritation and the beauty, the frustrating and the soothing.  To consider and to choose from which parts I shall choose my disposition for the day.  
 
So I’ve thought it over and decided that on balance and for now, I’m going to keep the faith, even it if means abandoning technology and walking to the bank.  I pray your day is gentle in every way.  
 
~peace & prayers,  pastor annette

*  apostasy ~ renunciation of a religious faith, abandonment of a previous loyalty                            

​June 21, 2016

                                      “There, where our understanding is outraged, where our nature rebels,
                             where our piety anxiously keeps its distance ~ that is exactly where God loves to be. 
​                                          There, though it confounds the understanding of sensible people,
​                          though it irritates our nature and our piety, God wills to be, and none of us can forbid it.”           
​                                                                   ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1933

Beloved:
​
    How close to home Pastor Dietrich’s words do strike the church eighty-three years later.  In these days of constant vitriol and violence when I long for spiritual comfort, his words remind me that discomfort may be the most spiritual place of all. For here is where God loves to be.  Maybe where God can work with us, where we flex the muscles of the faith we claim:  patience, trust, gentleness, helplessness, emptiness, leaning, waiting, hoping, taking care of one another, knowing the outcome of nothing for sure.  Where God can work with us and we with God, more than any other place. 

    The summer has set in fully now.  Vacation Bible School and Habitat for Humanity were big and hard and worth every ounce we gave to them.  I couldn’t be prouder of University Baptist Church for your joyful service in both.  Our next big deal is the HomeComing Celebration this fall, October 15 & 16.  You’ll start seeing the Jubilee logo around the place soon enough.  See Carl Briggs, Vicki Pierce or Hope Snodgrass if you want to help with planning.  There’s ever so much to do.  As always, it is my pleasure and my privilege to serve the gospel with you in this time and place. 

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette
​

June 14, 2016

                        (On the occasion of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016)

Beloved:

    We overslept and missed our plane to North Carolina where I was performing a wedding the next day.  In our rush to the airport we didn’t check the kids’ backpacks and at security the TSA agent confiscated our 7-year-old’s super soaker water gun.  We were mortified.  The agent apologized.  Our son wept.  That trip more than twelve years ago and I remembered it this morning, thinking, “We are a very, very confused country.”

    Vigils are happening everywhere, but for the life of me I can find no more useful words to write or sing or pray.  None which give proper due to the sacrifices made on this altar of national disgrace.  National, not human, for every nation does not suffer these same tragedies.  Different tribes with different values have made different choices.  They do not bury first graders en masse.  And if funerals for first graders do not finally break us, I fear we are too far gone.  I fear we have left the moral atmosphere where human decency may yet be recovered.  Our best last hope may only be repentance.  And if we must have words, I suggest the first chapter of Isaiah, verses 15-20:​

​~ Pastor Annette

June 7, 2016
​
Beloved:

    VBS 2016 will go down as the year Pastor Annette didn’t burn the building down.  I was the last to leave Vacation Bible School set-up Sunday afternoon.  “Let me get tomorrow’s dessert out of the oven and I’ll lock up,” I told my excellent 12-year-old kitchen assistant. The chocolate raspberry crumb bars looked and smelled perfect.  I turned off the oven and set the pan on the stovetop to cool overnight, not noticing the burner still on beneath it. The retired men’s group arrived a few minutes before me Monday morning. They had already opened the windows and cleared the smoke. Some people think it smells terrible.  Compared to, say, six thousand square feet of smoldering ash, I think it smells wonderful.   
​

    #ubcbuildsahouse2016 is our other take-away from this week and next.  The Habitat for Humanity Builders Blitz house we are sponsoring is literally going up as I type.  By day’s end today it will be completely dried in, with electricals and plumbing roughed in, lots of interior drywall and exterior siding hung.  As you can see, I’ve picked up all kinds of builder lingo lately.  I did a quick walk-through this morning and talked with our homeowners, Irma and Oscar.  They are very pleased with the process and with how their house is coming together.  Irma’s new front porch is to die for.  And thanks, to the UBC Gatorade crews coming and going from church to work site every afternoon too.

​    Summing up:  the church didn’t burn down, the Soto house is going up, and kids are streaming in to Bible School every evening.  Summer 2016 is shaping up just fine at University Baptist Church.  I pray the same for you and yours!  
 
~ peace & prayers,

pastor annette