As we look at these scriptures, Luke 7:11-18 & John 11:17-27, I’m focusing on those whom Jesus helped and the situations because I believe that we have an epidemic of brokenness.

We are doing our very best to ignore it, and I don’t mean we as in just the people gathered in this room. I mean a big we. In fact, it may be the whole world.

But I want to specifically talk today about the young men and boys in our culture who are feeling lost, confused, and are facing social isolation, economic anxiety, and societal expectations. Research shows that young men spend more time alone. They are isolating, and that is linked to depression and anxiety. Right now, the suicide rate for men is higher than women, and the economic change over the last couple of decades has not helped. Companies have defunded benefits and reduced workforces for a better profit on their stock, which has left the traditional idea of the company man to no longer exist.

You don’t go and work for a company and expect to retire from them. That doesn’t happen because the allegiance to the workforce isn’t there. The allegiance to the company isn’t there either. That’s leaving them feeling very unsure of who they are to be. We have also done a good job of lifting our girls and young women, which needed to be done, but we can’t do that at the expense of our boys and young men. We need to empower every person.

We’ve talked a lot in the last years about toxic masculinity, but I don’t think that we have defined what healthy masculinity looks like. And we need to. I think that’s where our scriptures help us.

That is where I’m heading and what can be gleaned out of these scriptures, because we need to help our young men and boys find their purpose, because the internet and social media are not anybody’s friend.

Their exposure to negativity, violence, and unrealistic masculine expectations is setting the stage for the violence we’ve been experiencing. I think we’re headed for, if we’re honest, a culture where brokenness is a sign of weakness, even being overwhelmed is a sign of weakness. We try to hide it or we try to fix it with a quick fix. But there are no quick fixes, because we don’t want to feel vulnerable. We don’t like that. That’s uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable with my vulnerability, too, and there has to be some place where we can show it.

I think this is what the church can be. It can be a place where we’re honest about our brokenness, about being overwhelmed by the world and what’s going on in it. But, too often, the church has been the least safe space because we are so good at judging each other. So good at pointing to another person’s faults so we don’t have to look at our own, but that’s something that we can change.

We say God’s vision for us, God’s mission for us, is to create a safe space, and we can do that. In the scripture today, both times Jesus goes and meets a grieving female.

In Lazarus’s story, I only talked about Martha, but Mary’s there too. We’ve got Jesus going and meeting three females, and I want to lift up how Jesus models for us this healthy masculinity.

He does tell the widow of Nain not to cry. I wish he wouldn’t have. I’d like to say, Luke put that in. I don’t know if Jesus said that or not, because in the story of Lazarus, if you keep reading, Jesus cries. Crying is not the end of the world, and we all need to get better at that.

But what Jesus shows us is that Jesus was not afraid of their pain or their anguish. Jesus walked toward it, not away from it. He walked toward them with empathy and compassion to meet them.

In Luke, he touched that coffin. He all but touched the dead body, which you may or may not think anything of, but back then, that was a big no-no. You didn’t wanna touch a dead body that made you unclean. He was going to have to go through ritual purification. Again, that was women’s work because we went through that every month anyway.

But Jesus wasn’t afraid of it. He was willing to allow himself to be vulnerable with the widow. The griever’s there with Martha. He takes Martha’s harsh criticism. I think Martha wanted to tell him off.

That also tells us something about what God can handle from us, that we can say our harsh words to God, and God can handle them. God wants the relationship. God’s not gonna get mad at us because we said something that could offend God, at least the God that I know. Because the God that I know, which I think is the one and only God, loves us and walks with us, comes to us in our brokenness to bring us healing if we allow ourselves to be open to it.

If we shut down and don’t allow God in, that’s on us. That’s the choice that God still lets us make, God won’t force God’s self on us, but God will come to us in our darkest nights, maybe not in ways that we expect. But, God will be there.

Jesus wasn’t afraid of death, not even of his own, but this is also not the “Jesus wasn’t afraid of death, so we don’t have to be either” sermon.

I’ve heard those sermons. Jesus knows that we’re human and that we do break. These women, if you put them in their culture, you need to know that they were about to be destitute. They could not inherit any of the wealth or property of the son or the brother. They were going to be homeless and on the streets begging. Jesus understands that, too, and does what he can to change that.

The ones who are without resources, the ones living on the streets, the ones who are lonely and broken, those are the ones we are to care about too.

So, what is our role based on this? Well, we’re not going to produce miracles. We’re not gonna raise anybody from the dead, but we can walk with those who are struggling. We can comfort and listen.

That is why we have a Compassion Team. Our Compassion Team will listen to us, and they will hold your confidences. You could be that person among us who just needs somebody to care about their pain, confusion, or anger.

If we look at our collective lives. We have learned a lot. For those who’ve been with this congregation for a long time. We know how to survive conflict. It is our humanity that unites us. According to the research, our DNA is 99.9% identical. It’s only that 0.1% that makes each one of us unique. That is not a big difference. Even though it’s a difference we tend to focus on.

We can choose differently.

We can choose to walk with each other, to comfort one another, to come and be reminded that our God is here for us. Life is hard, and we are all going to suffer in some way. That is a reality.

Sorry if this is a downer, but I hope that you also hear that we are surrounded by the love and grace of God. That is beyond our imagination, and I hope that you feel that today.

If you need that in a physical way, reach out to the Compassion Team, and let one of them walk with you.

May it be so. Amen.

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 Today is the beginning of a new season. We are now in what is called ordinary time or the season after Pentecost.

This is the longest season of the year. Today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity is when we celebrate God, the traditional language is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit. We also say Creator, Redeemer, & Sustainer to identify their roles.

I change things a little bit every season. Like the call, the prayer of confession is now silent, and we added the prayer of illumination. That’s not a piece we usually do. I gave that to the reader, which is different. We also have this table, because we’re going to talk about who Christ welcomes to the table.

Specifically, at this point, we’re talking about the people who would have been considered by everyone else to be outsiders, like a Roman centurion.

The Roman centurion in our scripture for today was the enemy.

He represented the empire that was taking the people’s money, taxing them to the point of poverty, and was a huge military presence that intimidated the people to make sure that they didn’t rise against the empire. All of that, and yet Jesus welcomes and heals him. I want to try to unpack all of that.

I was also at Penn Central Conferences’ annual meeting on Friday and Saturday.

It was an emotional time because we believed this was the last annual conference meeting of the Penn Central Conference. We believe that and hope that at the General Senate in July, they will agree to let us become one Keystone Conference.

So, the four conferences in Pennsylvania will become one conference, and then the State of Pennsylvania will be divided into three regions. We will be in region one, going towards Philadelphia. Berks County is with us, Lebanon County is coming with us, and York County is coming with us. We’re joining essentially the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference. It will not be called that. We’re all gonna be the Keystone conference.

There were a lot of mixed emotions in that. The keynote speaker was Rev. Dr. Courtney Stange-Tregear from the Cornerstone Fund, which is the investment and loan branch of the United Church of Christ. Telling you that, you might be surprised to know that her specialty is in storytelling. She tells the stories of the loans that they have made and the work that has been done for Christ, and she reminded all of us of the importance of storytelling.

I’m still figuring out how we’re gonna do more storytelling together. But I will tell you as an exercise, she had us at our tables tell a true, personal story.

I think this story fits all of her criteria.

While I was sitting there, I was also thinking about my sermon. I think about it all week. This sermon was called Who Is Worthy. And I realized that when I go to the conference, I want to be viewed as worthy by the rest of the conference. I want them to acknowledge and respect who I am as your pastor. There are a whole lot of other pastors. Not that I would be special, but that we would all be valued.

I have learned in my life that a way in which I feel worthy is by pleasing others, but when I please others, I don’t take care of myself, and I also end up hurting relationships. That was my takeaway from that presentation. And I think that was what I was supposed to be focusing on, because on my phone, I have a little app that sends me positive messages. When I flipped over my phone after thinking about that, my phone said this, “I love myself too much to question my worth.”

If that’s something that you needed to hear today, that you should love yourself enough that you don’t need to question your worth. I want you to take that with you.

This whole idea of worthy and of who’s worthy or who’s not, that’s what I’ve been sitting with.

I did what I call a deep dive. I went through this scripture, and it’s a Jewish leader who goes and says, the centurion is worthy. But the centurion says, “I’m not.”

I looked at how many other scriptures talk about someone being worthy, and there are 78 scriptures in the Bible talking about being worthy or not being worthy. What I noticed is that every single one of them was in the Voice of Humanity. It was a human who was saying about declaring someone’s worth or unworthiness. It was never God or Jesus. And what that tells me is that this isn’t a God issue. This is an us issue. We are the ones who are concerned about who’s worthy and who’s not. God isn’t concerned about that, and I think that’s because to God, we all have worth. After all, we are God’s children. God is that parent who loves us unconditionally. We don’t have to prove that we’re worth loving. God just loves us.

Are we really worthy?

I think we’re pretty darn self-interested. I think we worry about ourselves more than we worry about what we’re supposed to be doing for God. We listen to ourselves and our egos more than what God is calling us to do.

Rather than commenting on this scripture and rather than commenting on the centurion’s worthiness, Jesus doesn’t. He comments on the amount of faith the Centurion has because the centurion asks for healing without knowing Jesus. He’s never met Jesus. They’ve never been in the same room together.

He’s heard the stories of what Jesus has done and he believed and he trusted that Jesus could make a difference in this servant’s life.

He believed without seeing. That’s us. Jesus isn’t here with us walking, talking, and we aren’t able to see his hands, his feet, and his side, but we trust that he is who he is and that he can still help us.

But we are the ones who create this label of worthiness. We’re the ones that create lines in the sand or boundaries that say these people are in and these people are out, and these people are good and these people are bad, and these people are worthy or not worthy. The church has been doing that for a long time. What I hear in this scripture is that that’s not ours to judge. God’s the judge, not us. And it’s not even a thing that God worries about.

We need to look at who we keep outside.

Who do we prevent from coming to the table that is not ours anyway? It belongs to Jesus. We need to invite and welcome all those who feel like they are not worthy to come into this house, because there are so many people who have been told that God does not love them. We need to be a different voice that says that we think God loves you. God wants a relationship with you, and you are welcome here. We want you to come in

Just to drive that point home a little more is the Galatians 3:23-29 scripture, which declares there are no labels. We are all Children of God, there are no longer the labels of Jew, Greek, slave or free, male or female, although we still have that one. It’s not about that. It’s about the fact that we are all children of God and that we are to care about the needs and well-being of others. That’s what God told us. That’s what Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself” – Mark 12:30-31. That’s who we are supposed to be.

We are to care for the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned, and those who struggle every day to survive. That is why it is so hard right now, because there are people in power who are not interested in that.

They are interested in making us afraid and telling us who to blame for it. As I was thinking about that, I heard a line from my favorite movie, The American President, where he says, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

Let’s go and be present with people. Our God wants to be our ultimate parent, thinking of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Today is Father’s Day. God wants to be that father figure, that one who encourages us and bodes us through the struggles, and who tells us not to give up. But we have a God who allows us to make choices. Recognizing that we will learn through our mistakes and that there will be comfort and support in our difficult times. Rev. Call said in her sermon, “God is most present in the breaking of our hearts.”

I am heartbroken by the stories that I see on the news.

I’m heartbroken for the people who are guilty until they can prove that they have documentation and that they’re a citizen or that they’re allowed to be here in America. But I’m also worried about the ICE agents and the effect this has on them.

I worry about our LGBTQ+ family and friends who are in Pride Month, the month where they celebrate that they can finally be who God created them to be. Yet, they’re not safe. They don’t feel safe. Not right now.

I grieve for Minnesota and for those senators, the families, the friends, and for the depth of anger and despair that person must have had to do that act.

We have people who are hurting, and they need to hear that God loves them. May this be the work that we do.

May it be so. Amen.

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We’re excited to invite you and your little ones to Terrific Tuesdays in Rader Park

A four-week summer program full of fun, learning, and outdoor adventure! Children ages 3–10 are welcome to explore the fascinating world of pollinators through hands-on, nature-based activities.

Program Schedule (10:00–11:30 AM):

June 17 – Bees
June 24 – Butterflies
July 1 – Caterpillars
July 8 – Special Presentation by Lisa Sanchez, Lancaster Parks Naturalist

Each session will take place in beautiful Rader Park, and snacks will be provided. Please note that a guardian must remain with their child throughout the program.

Registration is now open, Click Here to Register!

 I was going to talk about the spirit and how the spirit is experienced differently in today’s scriptures, Acts 2:1-6 & John 14:8-17 and 25-27. But something wasn’t sitting with me.

I’m going to call that the spirit wasn’t sitting with me. I even woke up this morning and said, “This isn’t the sermon I want to do.” Which is kind of scary on the day that you’re gonna do it. But it opened me to read my email, and in my email, I found a very heartfelt, but serious email from Rabbi Jack Paskoff letting me know just how afraid the Jewish population is right now. After this, we just had the attack in Washington not too long ago, and then there was the attack in Colorado, and I knew that the attack in Colorado left me almost numb with grief.

I’m sharing this because as Christians. We have had a habit of saying that our beliefs trump theirs. That’s where we started, but now we know better. It sets up this hierarchy. Like they’re not as evolved, they just haven’t come to the belief or faith that we have. That is the understanding within Christianity that fuels antisemitism. And right now in our country, there are so many people hurting, and there is this permission to be cruel and hateful that the church cannot abide with.

That is not who we’re called to be on any level. We need to remember that as we talk about our faith, as we talk about Christ, as we talk about Pentecost.

They read the Book of Ruth. Now, two things about that to make note of. Shavuot is 50 days after the second night of Passover. But by celebrating Ruth, she became one of the ancestors of King David. They get King David because of Ruth.

But Ruth was not born of Jewish heritage. You can convert to Judaism, and it means that it’s more inclusive. Judaism itself is more inclusive then we give it credit for.

Then we use this term Pentecost, Penta meaning five. Pentecost is supposed to be 50 days after Easter, and you’re going, “wait a minute, it’s been eight weeks. That’s not 50 days.” But we don’t count the Sundays because we need to make it complicated. Pentecost is supposed to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit’s been with us since the beginning.

We talk about that in Genesis 1. The word for the pronouns we use for God are all plural. I hope you’ve noticed that. If not, go back and read Genesis one again, and you’ll be surprised. We talk about those plural pronouns, saying that it is because God is plural. We have a plural understanding of God in that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, or the Creator, Redeemer Sustainer. That’s one of the reasons we are sometimes accused by other religions of not being monotheistic. That’s the whole Trinity piece. That’s next Sunday, come back and we’ll try to try to unpack how we have one God that we know in three different ways.

In Proverbs 8, the spirit is described as wisdom. Wisdom was there from the beginning. a All of this is trying to come together. Maybe not very clearly, but in a way that is part of it because the spirit is mystery.

I was going to start this sermon by saying, “How do you experience the spirit of God or the Holy Spirit?”

In our scripture, Acts 2:1-8, it comes as this rushing wind and fire. There are flames, tongues of flame up above everybody’s head. Suddenly this group of people, who would’ve been gathered in Jerusalem because of their festival. According to Luke’s version, it’s this large group of people who suddenly, because of the Holy Spirit, can understand one another in languages they didn’t know. It’s this inclusive nature of Christianity.

The point is that everybody there was able to communicate and be together. Then, they decided this was so good that they needed to live together, and they chose to call themselves followers of the way. The name ‘Christians’ came much later. They were followers of the way, and they chose to live together to share their things and to create a whole different way of being. That attracted people. People wanted to have what they had. To know that spirit that calls them to be loving, compassionate, and caring. That’s the same spirit that in John 14:8-17 and 25-27 was being promised.

But, in John 20, according to John’s gospel, it happens in the upper room when Jesus breathes on the disciples. It’s a breath.

So, whether the spirit comes to you as the breath of God that enlivens you and brings humanity to life. From the very beginning, we are breathed on again to put more and new energy into us, and all of this breathing, all of this inclusion. It’s all about relationships. It’s all because from the very beginning, God has been trying to be in a relationship with humanity. And humanity has constantly done otherwise.

But God continued to speak and God spoke through the priests, God spoke through the prophets, and we continued to say that when things were going wrong, we needed God on our side. But, when the storms cleared, everything’s great now, we got this. Our story is that God finally decided to come and be one of us, that we just weren’t getting it. And so God came and took on this body because then God was relatable. God was one of us, and yet still wasn’t enough for us. We rejected that God, crucified that God, and God still came back and said, “I’m going to make sure that my spirit is in all of you, so that everyone has the opportunity to follow God.”

The question is whether we choose to or not? Do we choose to listen to that still, small, forever speaking voice?

Maybe it’s this energy in us that’s telling us something’s wrong? Something’s not right here. The way I’m supposed to live, I need to do something. If you have that kind of energy within you, I call it a nudging, but sometimes it’s a bit stronger than a nudge. God’s given me a head slap once or twice. Because I, too, can get caught up in what I want and what I think is important, but it’s not about me, and it’s unfortunately, not about you. It’s about our relationship with God.

I do mean OUR relationship, because we have our relationships, but we need the body. We need the group because it’s within the group that we keep ourselves on track. It’s within the group that when one of us is falling apart, the group can come together and be the hands and feet of Christ. That’s why we come together. We gather each week because life is hard.

I get frustrated and depressed watching the news, and I need to come together with the rest of you so that I remember who I am, that I remember who God is, and our reform traditions. We believe God’s got this. We just keep going because God loves us and cares about us, and we, too, love and care about others. So when we see someone who’s being picked on, we reach out to them.

God calls us to be those people, and God calls us to have a little bit of fun. So we’re we’re going to close this sermon with having some fun.

I know that some of you are now panicking, asking, “what is she going to have us do?” You are going to be the spirit. Because today for Pentecost, the spirit came as a rush of a mighty wind. I’m gonna have you breathe and ask, “Who?”

Every time I say the word spirit, that’s what we’re gonna do. “On that day, the Spirit broke through every barrier, language, culture, fear, and doubt. That day, the Spirit turned hiding into preaching, confusion into clarity, and death into life. That was just the beginning because the Spirit kept moving through baptisms, through brave words, through acts of love and justice. The Spirit did not stay in the upper room or the temple. The Spirit moved into hearts and homes and every corner of the world. Today, the Spirit is still moving, still breaking barriers, still breathing hope, still calling you, calling each of us. So if you wonder, am I ready? Am I good enough? Am I brave enough? Remember Pentecost, and remember this: you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be open because the Spirit is already moving.

Will you let the Spirit move in You?”

May it be so. Amen.

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 This week I had a call from someone who’s not part of the church, but has a lot of questions about the church, about what we believe, and about how we have faith.

He had a lot of questions about what faith is, and I gave him my definition of faith, which to me is believing in something that you cannot prove. Hebrews 11:1 has this as the definition of faith, “Now faith is the assurance of things, hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

With those definitions, I want you to think about what it is that you have faith in? Where does your faith lie? I think an equally important question is why. What is your why? What is the why that helps you have that faith in this conversation with this person asking questions? He was asking, but how do you know that they’re telling you the truth?

So, what is your why? Why do you believe what you believe? I think it is so easy for humans. There’s a part of humanity where our default is to have more faith in ourselves than in anybody else. If we think about that, I think that’s because we think that we can control ourselves. We can have faith in that which we can control, but that is not faith.

And that believing in ourselves more than God is what broke the relationship with God. From the very beginning, God gave us everything, and we thought we knew better. Isn’t that still true? Aren’t there times when we think we know better? We’re so good at making up stories in our heads and reinforcing those stories. We see examples that reinforce the stories that we want, but all of that is following our agenda rather than God’s agenda.

One of our challenges in life, which doesn’t stop, is to learn to open ourselves to God’s leading, to open ourselves to God’s agenda, which is about love and forgiveness. Are we able to let go of that?

When I think about how we try to trust in ourselves because we think we can control ourselves, I also think about how we can control ourselves until we have a diagnosis that we can’t control, or we’re faced with the realities of aging and bodies. They don’t work the way we want them to, and we can’t do anything about it.

Having faith is challenging and that’s why I think we get this beautiful letter to the Ephesians.

Whether Paul wrote it or whether someone else wrote it later, we don’t really know. But it begins by praising the Ephesians for their faith, but then it goes on to pray that they would have wisdom and that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened.

If we ask this question of why it was written this way? I think we realize that it sounds like they were having a hard time. They had faith, but they weren’t as good at getting along with each other. Especially if you’ve read the whole book. There’s a lot about how they’re to be the body of Christ and what that looks like. But this is all the writer is asking, that they may have this wisdom and revelation, that they can have a stronger ‘why’ for their faith.

When everything’s falling apart and we pray to God and it doesn’t feel like God’s listening sometimes, but is that because God’s not listening or is it because God’s not doing what we want God to do, and don’t we have to wrestle with that? That maybe what we want isn’t the most loving and forgiving thing. Maybe it has more of our agendas tied up in our fears.

The author of Luke wrote both the Gospel and the Book of Acts and our scripture today, Luke 24:36-53, is the Ascension story or scripture in the Gospel of Luke.

There’s a slightly different account in the Book of Acts and one might ask, why did he write two different. accounts? Well, they have different purposes. This one is still trying to help the disciples to understand that their work was to continue the work of Christ.

This scripture puts us back in Easter, which seems like a long time ago, seven weeks. This puts us back on Easter Day, and the disciples are confused and scared. They’re scared because they watched the one that they were following, the one that they loved, cherished, and believed had the answers. They watched him be killed. They didn’t do anything about that, and they were afraid that they were next.

Then they heard about this empty tomb, and they really didn’t know what to do about that because they didn’t have his body. So, where was his body? Luke 24:36-53 comes right after.

The story about the road to Emmaus, if you remember that story where two other disciples were walking and they met someone and they invited him back for dinner, and during the breaking of the bread at dinner, all of a sudden they realized he was Jesus, and he disappeared. Now they’ve shown up with their story. They’re confused and they’re scared. In the middle of that, Jesus just shows up and says, “Peace be with you.” Every time he shows up in a resurrection moment, he says, “Peace be with you.”

The word that he uses is (i-ray’-nay) means peace of wholeness. It’s a wish of health and welfare for them to be whole. In other words, don’t be afraid, scared, or self-limiting. He’s inviting them. He’s trying to give them this freedom to open themselves to the rest of the world. To open themselves and do the work that he was doing, meeting people who were struggling and offering them love and forgiveness.

I often say it’s about doing the next most loving thing. Anytime we have a challenge and we don’t know which way to go, what is the most loving thing to do, or what is the most forgiving thing to do? That’s what God is doing with us. That’s how God’s trying to guide us in loving and forgiving ways. That’s what God’s looking for us to do.

God was looking for the disciples to let themselves out of the locker room. Don’t be closed down, but be open. Be open and go out. Go out into the world. Make a difference in the world.

All of creation was meant to be in harmony. From the very beginning, we pushed back on that. We thought that we knew better, or we wanted to do it our way.

The reason Jesus came, the whole incarnation, is all about Jesus, God coming after trying in so many different ways through prophets, priests, and through the writings of the Psalms. God needed another way to get our attention.

He came in the body of Jesus. In Jesus, He showed us how to live, but the disciples wanted that to continue. They said, ‘Don’t go away. Stay with us because life is better when you are here.’ We’d probably say that too. We’ve got a mess here. Come on back and straighten this out.

But that’s not the point. Jesus is probably saying, ‘You didn’t listen to me the first time.’ That’s why Jesus gave us the Spirit, and the Spirit encourages us to go out in love and forgiveness. It’s about repentance and transformation. We live transformed lives so that others realize the joy that we have and ask themselves, “Why are they so happy? Why can they look at this mess and be okay?” It’s because we have hope in something bigger than all of this as reformed people.

I was just reminded yesterday at the Interfaith Coalition, Lee Barrett was there talking about the reformed tradition and saying how, because we believe that God is sovereign and that in the end all will be well, God will win. That was last week’s scripture in Revelation. That, in the end, it will be the garden again, and all will be well.

We are called to live through this time to look for and stand for justice and to make sure that everyone is treated equally and with equity. Make sure that we are living in ways that are loving of our brothers and sisters.

As I was sitting with all of this, I was still struggling and wasn’t clear that the why was so much a part of the questions that I was asking. I ended up finding myself at Rader Park, sitting on the steps at Brubaker Run, watching the water. That’s a place that is comforting and calming for me.

As I sat there and thought about the river, I thought we were meant to be like the water, trusting that God would guide the way. There will be bends that will have to be gone around. There will be falls that we experience. We’ll have to go around the rocks, the impediments, but we will also help to purify with that love and that forgiveness. We’ll wash away the impurities, and we’ll promote and bring life-giving properties to all that we meet.

Knowing that the way leads us towards God. So we follow the way. But, I encourage you this week to think about why you follow the way and where you draw your reasoning from. What is your big why? For why you believe and have faith that you do.

In these trying times, we need to hang on to our why. That is why our hope is our resilience in these trying times.

May it be so. Amen.

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