Dear PCUM family,

Like many who grew up in the 1970s, my childhood heroes and favorite musicians included Bob Marley, the Jamaican and Rastafarian singer, musician, and songwriter. Marley was a global star back then. His death from cancer in 1981, at just 36 years old, and only a couple of weeks before my high school graduation, was both a tragedy and an unwelcome end of innocence.

Bob Marley combined reggae, ska, and rocksteady music with his charismatic vocal and songwriting style to reach and touch millions of people. He wasn't a Christian or a Presbyterian, but his conviction that this human life is a miraculous gift we don't earn or construct ourselves, and what we do and what we believe is nothing more--and nothing less--than our grateful response to that gift, is as Reformed (Presbyterian/ Protestant) as any I've come across:

“Life and Jah are one in the same. Jah is the gift of existence. I am in some way eternal, I will never be duplicated. The singularity of every [person] is Jah's gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth.”

In Christ's peace,

Pastor Greg Horn