New Life Fits and Starts

The daffodils have made their appearance. The trees are flowering and getting green. The smell of newly mown grass comes wafting in through the open window. It’s springtime in New Jersey—one of my favorite times of the year.

And yet, it is also a time when, one day is damp and raw, while the next day, the sun is shining brightly and the temperatures warm up. Should I turn up the heat? Don’t we need the air conditioning? When I consider my vegetable garden, there are days when I wonder if I really need to wait until Mother’s Day to put in the tomatoes, while there can be days later in May when I worry about a morning frost. Spring brings new life to the world around us here in the Northeast, which makes it such a lovely time of the year, but the new life comes, not in a smooth progression, but in fits and starts.

And I think that’s how it is with more than just springtime. There are seasons of transition in life. Something new is coming, but it doesn’t arrive smoothly, on schedule. It’s more confused than that. New life comes to us in fits and starts.

          

By July, the AC will be running full tilt. There will be a time when the new thing that we anticipate now will be old hat. But, for now, we can find, if we choose—if not joy fully bloomed, then at least life, in all the incredible wonder of its fits as well as its starts.

--Pastor Don Steele

SMALL RESURRECTIONS

I have to admit that sometimes I don’t quite know what to do with Easter. The story of Jesus’ resurrection is central to Christianity, but it is also the story of something completely unique: a man, dead and buried, rising up from his grave, alive again as more than a resuscitated corpse, but with this ability to show up here and there almost miraculously. What relevance does the story of something so unique have to the lives we live?

            This past fall, as the elections were going on and life seemed to be filled with a sort of politics that I found to be offensive, I discovered our subscription to Netflix, and joined the trend of binge watching television programming, especially British detective series. Recently, I have been watching Broadchurch, a series set in a fictional English seaside town where a teenage boy has been murdered. The first season deals with finding the boy’s murderer, while the second season deals with that man’s trial—a man who was a neighbor and a family friend of the murdered boy. When the murderer is discovered, the mother of the murdered boy feels a great deal of anger towards the wife of the murderer, rupturing the friendship they once had, but as the second season progresses, you see the boy’s mother change, not suddenly, not dramatically, not with some big forgiveness scene. It’s a gradual thing, but by the end of the second season, you can tell that she forgives the other woman, and their relationship is restored. 

            There is a resurrection, of sorts—not in the bold way that happened that first Easter, but more as a sign, a reminder that, even when there seems to be no hope, with God loose in the world, there always, always is, at least, hope for the possibility of new life.

--Pastor Don Steele

Pilgrimage

My friend invited me to go on a pilgrimage for Good Friday. I accepted and began to prepare- carefully choosing what I would wear and carry- preparing for a moving, quiet, spiritual experience. I arranged for my children to stay home so that I could go and spend time connecting with God.

When I got there, out to the mountain desert above Santa Fe in the pre-dawn morning, we began with prayer and then began walking to the little mountain chapel. Soon our group was surrounded by a group of Middle School boys- noisy and energetic and bouncing off one another as they swapped music and talked about girls. I was jarred and a little frustrated- what was going on? Where was my spiritual experience?

I continued down the road, using walking meditation to try to get closer to God- trying to block out the noise and chaos, surrounded by thousands of people and being served oranges and water by hundreds of different families and churches, people carrying wooden crosses next to families with little kids running around. Everyone laughing and catching up with one another. And it finally it came to me, I was close to God.  Jesus was with us in the crowd, and this is what it looked like. Jesus had showed up and he was walking with us, swapping music and greetings, catching up with old friends and cousins and being fed by the hospitality of strangers. The loud, chaotic crowd reminded me that the Holiness of God is not just for a mountain glen and a quiet chapel- the holiness of God is with us in the middle of our busy, chaotic lives.

Sometimes as parents, our time with God can feel a lot more like that busy crowd than the quiet, contemplative, stained glass moments of stillness that we might be longing for. It’s my prayer for all of us as we approach Easter morning, and we ask God to renew our faith, that we see the Holy Spirit blowing among us, and working in the midst of our lives. It tells us in the Bible that Jesus was born as a child so that he could walk with us and live with us. I think that the crowded pilgrimage reminds us that Jesus continues to show up and walk around in our neighborhood- walking with us in the busy season of parenthood. 

-Rev. Deborah Huggins