CHURCH CROSSING

Dear Friends in Christ -

Yep. This blog looks different. Yep. It's on purpose, the result of some revelations from the continuing education class that I took last week.

My friend Donna (also a priest who has required "cont ed" hours to log) invited me to take a course with her, entitled "Faith and the Practice of Writing." Author Nora Gallagher taught the course, and she really pressed us to not only write, but also to make sure we're saying something important in a clear and compelling way.

One day, at lunch, the discussion circled around the practice of blogging. I confessed that I find most blogs BORING, including, occasionally, my own! So we talked about what makes blogs NOT boring, and agreed that one blog that was not boring was Julie Powell's blog "The Julie/Julia Project." Why? Because it's a blog with a plotline: a secretary in a dead-end job cooks 536 Julia Child recipes in 365 days in her tiny kitchen in an NYC apartment. This compelling, plot-driven blog was so not-boring that it became a book; the movie version will be out in just a few weeks.

So what about THIS blog? Well, I think all you readers out there deserve a little more than what you've been getting. Not that nice little stories about parish events and honest reflections on spiritual things are bad - they just don't make for truly compelling reading on an ongoing basis.

From this day forward (for at least the next year!), this blog is going to be about our "Church Crossing."

In the past few years, we, the people of God at St. Paul’s, have left our own version of Egypt, crossing a Red Sea of longstanding budget deficits, a failed relationship with a former rector, and crumbling facilities. Now we have (almost) balanced our budget, built great relationships, and beautifully restored our facilities. We’ve made the passage out of Egypt. Now we're solidly in the desert.

Now, you may be thinking: “What?! Desert?!? Wait a minute! I'm not sure that sounds like progress. I'm not sure that's where I/we want to be!”

But think about it. For the Israelites – the first “people of God” – the desert meant deliverance from oppression, from old ways of living that were, at the very least, not the best. The desert meant being “on the move” from where they had been to where they were going: the land of promise. The desert meant being closer to, and intentionally led by, God – personally – pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night. Having sand in every crack and crevice of pots, sheets, and ears was worth it.

So here we are. The desert’s all ours. Let’s figure out how to get a rhythm of moving forward and pitching our tents, moving forward and pitching our tents.

Faithfully with you in our “Church Crossing,”
Janet+