Beloved:

I know a woman who can knit entire sweaters while she reads.  I can barely drink coffee while I read, but this morning I actually finished a book, Black Power, by Stokely Carmichael.  I ought not have graduated college without reading it.  Then again, that’s the thing about reading:  it’s never done.  If I’m reading, something else isn’t getting done.  Certain books remind us that certain things ought be left undone in order for us to be changed into the kind of people into which certain books might change us.  Should we have the faith to sit and read, that is.
 
The book list I gathered at a recent conference on race is like a day at the gym, but for my heart and brain.  I’m just over halfway through Between the World & Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I can only manage a few pages at a time because of the way it hurts my heart.  My heart must be hurt this way if I’m to be remade, and I want to be remade as it has to do with race.  Next is The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward Baptist.

Such faith work is hard for me.  I’d rather knit, of course.  And I’d gladly clean the chicken coop or go to the dentist rather than have myself turned inside out like this.  Just writing these words makes my stomach hurt a little.  I feel losses coming on, but I cannot tell you what they are for sure.  Confidence is one; confidence in how this world works and in what I’ve always thought was true.  It’s a confidence I’ll be glad to live without someday, I expect.  But for now I am mostly shaky and a little lost, which, as we know, is the perfect place to practice faith in the One who holds us all.
​ 
~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

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.