Repentin' ain't easy

February 27, 2018

​Beloved:
            I am home.  I love being away and I love being home.  Away from all the daily chores and pulls on my time.  Home with the dogs and this kitchen and my own bed.  Away to walk on the beach.  At home to see these daffodil bulbs popping through again.  Low country food.  Eggs from my own hens.  It is all, as my favorite philosopher Mary Poppins said, practically perfect in every way.  

            The best part of my retreat was surely a retreat from the news.  Upon re-entry I found not much had changed in eight days.  The country up in arms over the deaths of white kids in Florida.  I’m glad for the outrage but ashamed that the everyday gun deaths of black kids doesn’t warrant similar grief.*  We’ve so much for which to repent and so little room to judge the rest of the world.  For this very reason the Church has bequeathed us Lent:  an entire season for reflection, confession and repentance.  


          For reflection I’ve been reading James Baldwin, the African-American writer whose prose positively sings, which is good as he has hard things to say to white people. Every story, book and essay is another heart-wrenching opportunity to confess the truth of the hardness in my heart.  A hardness that protects the guilt and shame I don’t want myself to know.  Repentance is hard work, the willful choice to live a different way – a way lit by the truth of what I’ve learned about the world and my own heart, no matter how others choose to live.   

            Repentin’ ain’t easy ~ that’s for sure.  But it is the only way to the life in Christ that he has offered us.  I’m glad to be on this journey with you.

~  peace & prayers,
pastor annette

* African-American children have the highest rate of firearm mortality and are 10 times as likely to be killed by guns as white kids are. http://abcnews.go.com/US/parkland-mass-shootings-children-wounded-killed-guns-daily/story?id=53197811

Photo: February sunset, Tybee Island, Georgia