Friends,

I am writing this annual report weeks after I intended to do so. The tremendous amount of ice and the subsequent creation of “snowcrete” all over our community has been a consuming issue. I feel as though the past week and a half has been abnormally busy, but I have accomplished very little of the tasks I would have been tackling if we were not faced with such abnormal weather.

In the short term, I want you to know that our Sunday worship has been profound for my spiritual life. I woke up to heavy snow on January 25th. I hope you got one of the many emphatic messages urging you not to come, even if you felt only slightly unsafe. A couple of people drove, and a dozen or so walked to worship. We live-streamed from my laptop. It was amateur, and it felt like family. At this time last week our parking lot looked like an ice-skating rink. Much effort was made to clear the ice, and locate salt, but our efforts were in vain. We knew that those in the congregation with heavy equipment were slammed with clearing roads and other areas, so we were hesitant to reach out. The call was made to cancel in-person worship and with great humility to start reaching out to those families. We were humbled with the rapid response we received from Rosemont Landscaping, and to our shock, by Saturday afternoon it was clear we could have worship in person. We had minimal music planned, no printed bulletins, but we invited people to join us anyways. I printed off 50 reading sheets, thinking that would suffice with the small crowd we would have. To my shock, the Church felt full! It was not up to our normal standard, but it felt like family.

In the long term, I want you to know that our Sunday worship has been profound for my spiritual life. Worshipping with you on Sunday feeds my soul. All the other cares melt away, and even when I am not feeling my best, I always leave Church feeling like I am in communion with God and all of you saints. Being together in worship is the foundation of our community. Don’t get me wrong, everything else is super important too, but without our Christian community, none of it would exist. You can join any outreach, political, social or educational organizations, but you choose to worship the incarnate God in community with us on Sunday morning. I can honestly say that if I were not a priest, I would worship at St. Luke’s.

I worry about a lot of different things throughout the week. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the water damage in the sacristy and how to talk about what is happening in Minneapolis or wondering if I should. I think about how we very much need an associate priest but there is not a clear path forward to affording one, and I am terrified of making the wrong hire. I wonder if being overwhelmed and solo is the safer future. I notice the white stains on the bottom of the legs of the table and chairs that came from the library. Yesterday, I did not have enough time to start writing this, but I did rage clean those stains and our poor seminarian started helping. I appreciated the help, and getting something small done helps make the big things feel more manageable. I worry about integrating newcomers, and sometimes when I am in the middle of a task, I’ll realize that we haven’t seen that one family in a while. I pray that they are okay and try to strategize how to reach out to them in a way that is caring but not guilt inducing. I understand our gutters are functional, but they look so bad. We need to repair the air handlers before we replace gutters that work just fine, so I stick that thought in the vault for a while. I pray for the sickest of our congregation as often as I can. I worry about the names I forget. I’ll find myself looking out of my office window imagining who our next treasurer could be. Are they waiting for my reply before the agenda is set?

The voices in my head that are aware of the things left undone are legion when I arrive on Sunday morning, and with snow falling Amaron Gerken brings in a patch of homemade cookies as it is the first time she signed up to do so. Cookies are important. I am highly suspicious that our Wednesday grill night has saved lives. You know those silly little comments I hide in the rubrics that a lot of people do not like? Those matter a lot to some people. Some people wish there was less music, while others come because that is what feeds them spiritually. Some love my preaching, while others merely tolerate my informal style, hoping that one day I’ll finally preach the way they think I should. A few love everything that happens here, but they are in the minority. On Sunday morning, we are not united by our uniformity in experience, instead we show up to worship God together in the hopes we will be fed, and I urge you to never underestimate the power of cookies or a personal invitation to that thing you are doing this week.

My hope is not that our efforts will be universally well received, but all that we do will be done in genuine love for God and our neighbor. I want to change or even purge, if necessary, the things that keep us from that love. I want people to feel this love by accident. It’s something they discover, rather than being explained to them.

To my shock, someone I haven’t spoken to in decades in Georgia reached out to my mother because they came across a blog on Substack called “Becoming Episcopalian” that is about someone discovering our St. Luke’s. (In the middle of writing the last sentence, Chip Russell, our former associate who is currently serving in Michigan had a vestry member send him the same blog and then forwarded it to me). A few of her posts have really taken off, which is not surprising, because she is a fantastic writer.

What I love about her blog is that I am rediscovering St. Luke’s through her eyes. She has a whole post about our cookie ministry, another about the bulletin, how passing the peace can be awkward for all the right reasons, and most importantly, there is not a script for being faithful at St. Luke’s. I play a role, but a minor one. The magic of the place is talking to John Moorman about football, finding common passions with Tom Hargrove, and as she puts it, “I didn’t realize how much I needed the freedom of being no one in particular until I had it.”

Everything we do must be done in love. The legion of voices reminding us of what has been left undone will always be there, but we should remember that just as our communion bread communicates God’s love, so can everything else. Going into this year, I am reminded that we have much to do, but we have much to do because this place is alive with love. The next time you grab a cookie after Church, do not take it for granted, because someone took the time to do that for you, so let it feed your soul as well as your belly.

-Nick