Pastors’ Column

It is practically sacrosanct and probably bordering on sacrilegious, but every August, I have a lemming-like need to walk the school supply aisles. Stacks of composition books speak to stories yet to be written. Planners promise an organized and efficient year ahead. Boxes of crayons and colored pencils are brimming with possibility. I even appreciate the calculators, protractors, and graph paper that tell me any problem can be solved. Walking the aisles, I see families pouring over lists, arguing over decisions, and digging through piles to find the last green college rule spiral ring notebook. I know that within a few hours of the first school bell, the best-laid plans will start to change. Planners will be filled and overfilled. Crayons will be lost and broken in the process of creating art. Calculators will prove frustrating and protractors dangerous. And those composition books? They will be filled with notes and essays and maybe even a few stories that need to be told. The year will be messy, complicated, and beautiful because people are all those things.

As we launched a search to find an Interim Associate Pastor for Youth and their Families, dare I say that when we became aware that the Reverend Andy Greenhow was moving back to the area, it felt providential.

Recording a CD of favorite hymns and anthems has been a conversation Pastor Rachel and I had been in discussion about a year or two before the pandemic, and our Wednesdays Together program was slowly working its way toward having the numbers and confidence to make it happen.

We are more than halfway through our summer preaching series, All Creatures Great and Small, which highlights the animals in scripture that shape the biblical story. As we have moved through the summer, I often find myself pointing out to my colleagues the places where these same animals that appear in our sermons also appear in our stained-glass windows here at the church.

On your phone, on the internet, and on television, you can constantly check how the stock market is doing, along with getting analysis about the prospects for a bull or a bear market. As someone interested in how my retirement investments are doing, I check on them regularly. However, there are other things we affirm as having value that are harder to measure regarding how they are doing. 

When I became a youth pastor, I knew I wanted to treat mission trips differently. I knew missions were more complicated than just going on a trip, doing service work for some poor people, telling people about Jesus, and going home. Rather, there was an opportunity for something genuinely sacred to happen.