Dear Friends,

As we enter the month of October, I pray you are enjoying the changing of seasons and the beautiful colors that come with autumn. I still have a hard time believing it's October already. Beginning in September, I seem to get caught up in the business of making sure the kids are where they need to be, preparing for the next meal, and trying to keep up with the never-ending loads of laundry (4 kids and a husband - what was I thinking?). Although the days go by fast, I try to remind myself to take moments to be thankful. I'm starting to learn to appreciate the little, different things in life. Below are a few "things I've learned as a middle-aged church mom" for which I'm thankful.

• The house will never be clean. Even if you clean it.

• There is beauty in everything, even the dirty house.

• Be thankful every day for something. Even if it’s just getting out of bed. (In a sermon Dr. Miles preached on October 2, he talks about a study that showed people who consciously were thankful for one thing a day actually increased their positivity.)

• Going to church makes me feel better. There’s something about being present that has a positive effect on the rest of my week.

• God usually shows up, sometimes it’s just not in the way we would expect.

• There are a whole bunch of different ways to pray. And there a whole bunch of ways that God listens.

• Speaking up is important. Don’t worry if others don’t like it. That’s their problem not yours.

• Social media is like chocolate cake. A little bit is good but too much can be messy, and bad for your heart.

• There is inevitably one spouse that does the dishes, and one who can never find the dishwasher, even when they’ve lived in the same house for 6 years.

• Ditto for laundry.

• Loving can be hard. So can crying. But they’re both necessary to get through life and both are good for the soul.

• Jesus still likes me. So, if nothing seems to be going right, at least I have that.

Blessings to you all in this season of color changing, and prayers for moments to pause and be thankful. I look forward to hopefully seeing you soon in church, whether online or in person.

Robin Hood

Care Coordinator

Daily Devotional

UCC Still Speaking

Why the Cross?

Vicki Kemper

Jesus said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” – Mark 8:34 (NRSV)

One Sunday after worship I was talking with a busy young mother holding her squirmy toddler. As we were speaking, Thomas pointed to the wooden cross I was wearing with my vestments and asked what it was.

“It’s a cross,” I answered.

“Why?” he asked.

After a brief pause in which I considered how to explain the cross to a two-year-old, I said, “Because Jesus had a cross.”

“Why?” Thomas asked, his big brown eyes leaving me no exit.

“Um, well, to teach us how to live,” I stammered.

“Why?” he asked again.

It occurred to me that Thomas had reached toddlerhood’s “why” stage, and that just engaging in conversation with him probably meant more than what I said. Still, I was a little unnerved by his question, the same one that afflicts many of us, whether we’re 2 or 42 or 92:

“Why the cross?”

So I was more than a little relieved when, after several more rounds of whys and becauses, Thomas took my cross in his little hand, turned it sideways and, declaring it “a plane,” sent it flying. Whew!

But dispatching with Jesus is not so simple. As much as he wants us to know life abundant and the fullness of God’s grace, he also wants us to realize that following him will bring trials, trouble, and tears.

Jesus knows this is hard for us to hear. Jesus knows it is hard for us to bear. Jesus knows that, just like little Thomas, we will keep asking why. And that’s okay. The answer is less important than staying engaged in the conversation.

Prayer

Holy God, I don’t always understand this cross business, but I believe that following Jesus will lead me to new life. Help me to stick with him even when the way is hard. Amen.

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Jesus said, “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35)

I’m writing to thank you for doing your part in caring for your fellow members of First Community. Thank you for calling to check in on one another and bringing over food in times of sickness, injury, or grief. Thank you for writing notes of care and prayer. Thank you for offering hugs and a listening ear. Most of all, thank you for reaching out to Robin Hood and me when you hear of something going on with a friend or fellow member. Even if you think we already know. Even if you know they are being cared for by others. I am so grateful for your diligence in keeping us in the loop so we can offer our care for them as well.

So it turns out, I’m also writing to urge you to keep doing this. Email or call us when you hear of someone in your Guild Group, Couple’s Circle, book group, or friend group that is going through a tough time or having surgery or lost a loved one. We want to know so we can pray, call, and walk beside someone during their time of need.

You all are both the fabric and the weavers of this community of faith. It takes each and every one of us to create this patchwork quilt of love, faith, care, and hope. In Paul’s letter to the Hebrews he writes, “and let us watch out for one another to provoke love and good works.” Indeed, may we continue to do so.

Your Pastor,

I easily recall a trove of “oldies” music I’ve loved, and must have recently heard The Supremes’ The Happening, inspiring this column’s title, “The Softening.”

I’ve written and spoken about this before, I’m sure, because I forget the lesson too easily, and am always trying to remind myself. But there came a point in my own spiritual practice when I began to realize, in an experiential way (not just intellectually) that the only way to begin to live a real life is to relax—to “float” into Being (just like one needs to just let go in the water in order to float; any tightness and you sink); to settle into the Stillness that is at the Source of Reality.

More recently I’ve been calling it a softening because the overall quality of this feeling is of “softness.” Not a term the majority of men ever want to use about themselves, nor to be seen as “soft.” But that’s because we equate softness with weakness. It’s our ordinary limited mind that comes up with that definition, based on social conditioning and the black and white dualistic thinking that cannot imagine being soft and strong at the same time.

You could call it becoming vulnerable, but again not in the way vulnerability is often perceived as a weakness. I think most of us realize that allowing yourself to be vulnerable actually takes far more strength and courage than tightening ourselves to conform to some picture that we think appears to others, the world, and ourselves(!) as being strong, courageous, and worthwhile.

Not that I live this way constantly—not even close—but a bit more often by remembering the naturalness, strength, fearlessness—even the selflessness—of this softening experience. I’ve been quoting something poet Mark Nepo said in a Chautauqua lecture this summer:

When things come together, it’s quiet.

When things fall apart, they make a lot of noise.

To re-member this softening experience is to come back together once again, and there is a quieting in my soul when this experience arises, and it is quiet and stillness that allows for an opening to soften a bit.

The quieting is a practice of non-doing. Not “doing nothing,” but resting from the constant doing of our ego activity, of our personality, that constant, habitual, and mostly unconscious efforting to present a particular “self” to the world and to our own selves.

Thus, spiritual practices that slow down this incessant activity in our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies, support moving from our consensual reality so we might soften into the divine reality. Any worthwhile spiritual practice is countercultural—they go against the grain of our cultural, societal, world, and even hereditary demands to keep up the “false” self, to join in the consensual reality.

All of us painfully recall, I’m sure, that at some point in our lives, perhaps even while we were teenagers, we realized the falseness of the way we were living, of the way we were being—the falseness of the way everyone seems to live and to be—and a corresponding desire to become authentically who we are. That’s the beginning of the spiritual search, to believe there must be a different way to live.

This is the basis of The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, the book guiding our new Tuesday night inquiry group. On the nature of the noisy (seemingly falling apart) and distracting world we live in, spiritual teacher Hameed Ali writes:

“But when we look deeply into our hearts most of us find that one of the primary things we want is something quite simple: We want peace. We want rest, ease, and quiet. We want to stop our constant doing. We want space from all the struggle, conflict, desire, fear, and hatred.

“Most of us, he says, tend to look for quiet by changing our physical surroundings. We look outside ourselves for this peace and ease of being. But much of the constant activity is actually inside our head. … So our mind tends to be noisy and busy, just like the world we live in. … Most of the time, we don’t even question it; we think that is just how it is. It is a noisy world, so we learn to live with it.”

So he says that inner practice is basically a matter of settling and quieting. “It is about settling into the simplicity of just being ourselves and feeling our realness—being in reality instead of in the echoes of reality.”

I love that description (although not the fact of it): that we often live only in the “echoes of reality.” This is what personality studies tell us; that supporting only this personality—this image of who we are—is an imitation (and develops as a necessary imitation) of our true nature, thus, we live only in echoes of the true, or divine, reality. Also, that it takes huge, continual energy to shore up our personalities, our self-images. When people begin to experience the true softening I’m speaking of, they often first feel utterly exhausted—it’s a lot of work to keep up that shell for days and months and years at a time!

This is what I think the Bible, and Jesus, mean when they say that we must love ourselves. We must love ourselves enough to give up this “self” we’ve taken ourselves to be. Hence, Jesus’ follow-up teaching: “those who lose their life for the sake of divine reality will find it.” A call to soften to the Divine Reality that is our true home in this physical existence, a home we are always in whether or not we relax into it. So we might as well relax—and float—in, as Edwina Gateley says, “the God we swim in.”

Editor’s Note:

More information about The Unfolding Now Study & Inquiry Group that’s just begun can be found HERE.

With a big thank you for the ongoing financial support from Guild X and the volunteer efforts from church member, Scott Van Hooser, we can continue our welcoming with fresh floral displays at our South Sanctuary entrance. 

The floral displays are in honor and remembrance of previous members of Guild X.   

Note: Our dinner times have changed from 5:30 pm to 6 pm throughout the summer. Book Discussion times remain the same.

Upcoming Dates and Activities

Sunday, October 16

5:30 pm

MCL Cafeteria

Book Discussion

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

Thursday, October 20

6 pm

Hunan Lion

2038 Crown Plaza, Dublin

(Bethel and McKitrick Blvd)

Thursday, November 3

6 pm

Cuco’s Taqueria

2162 Henderson Road

Thursday, November 17

6 pm

Napa Kitchen

7148 Muirfield Drive, Dublin

Sunday, November 20

5:30 pm

MCL Cafeteria

Book Discussion

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**Bring your ideas for our Christmas dinner in December.