Friends,

When we started this Lenten season, it was still insanely cold outside. Snowcrete was a relevant and hot topic. On the first day of Lent, we reminded each other of our shared mortality by spreading ashes on each other’s foreheads. It was beautiful and solemn. The children’s programming on the first Wednesday Burger Night was inside, and no one would have dreamed of taking kids out into the dark cold. Last night, parents and kids lingered well after the official ending of the program and enjoyed the light and warmth. Regardless of how we frame this season, it only starts off being about death but unambiguously ends teaching us about new life.

The things that people post on social media baffle me.

In my formative years, the concept that the internet could be used by foreign governments to influence citizens of other countries was beyond comprehension. Now this is commonplace and a cost-effective means of weakening the enemy that you can’t afford to go to war with. My freshman year of college was the first year that Facebook was available, and it was only available to college students of select Universities. You could only register with e-mail addresses from those universities, and it was a scandal the following year when some High Schoolers managed to get on. In these golden years, the internet was mainly used for sharing videos of cats, and it was glorious.

Friends,

I feel like once in a blue moon there is a television show that is made for children that adults get into as well. When Leandra and I were dating we loved to watch episodes of Adventure Time, which follows a young boy named Finn in a surreal world named Ooo with his magical dog named Jake, who talks and is also his brother. The surface of the story is super frivolous, light-hearted and simple. However, when you pay attention to the background, it is clear there is a concurrent story. Glimpses here and there point to the true setting. The world in which they live with all the magic and fun exists in our world but in the distant future after a nuclear war. The narrative weaves in and out of seriousness. Characters that you once thought you knew become complex. Typically, villains do not remain villains. Redemption arches and regret abound, the characters are mortal and sometimes die, and the characters grow. When broaching impossibly hard topics it is often helpful to have a frivolous setting. When we found out that Leandra was pregnant, I began counting down the days until Andrew would be old enough to watch Adventure Tim with me.

Friends,

I write this as I return from Paul Spring Retirement Community, where we do monthly services. The first service is for the general population. Nancy Morrissey is St. Luke’s unofficial representative at Paul Spring, and she always does such an amazing job of creating community and inviting people to Church. The little theater they put us in felt full in today’s service! The service is sacred, but most people go for Rev. Vanilla Bean, my dog, who always goes to Paul Spring wearing one of her hats. After that service we go to the memory care section and do a trivia game called “The Answer is Jesus!” (The answer to every question is indeed Jesus) and then celebrate a short service. A retired pediatrician with no family who is also a holocaust survivor, always comes. Even though she is non-verbal, she gets the most out of the service. She generally stands in front of me and insists on holding my hand when we bless the bread and wine.

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.

Friends,

Before I try to tap into some meaningful touchy-feely stuff, here is the most important things you need to know:

First and foremost, know that the world is not working the way it should. We knew this going into the storm last Sunday, but this is to a significantly greater degree than I had imagined. Our strategy for plowing the parking lot made sense; however, we inadvertently created ideal conditions for making a thick layer of ice directly on the asphalt, and it is nearly impossible to get up. Snow plows do nothing, we have spread all the salt that we could find, and I even brought my little tractor down to try to break it up, and the parking lot is still very treacherous.

Friends,

Last week a small group of volunteers mostly composed of St. Luke’s members were worked as federal employees and members of our outreach committee, filled three shopping carts up with the food and then packed fifty bags of groceries to hand out. We had an online sign-up where we invited anyone affected by the shutdown to sign up to receive some groceries. We threw in the extra bean soup mix from the pumpkin patch, and a church member donated some dog food as well. A few of us hung out for about three hours while people came to pick up their food on that Tuesday evening. Now that big push to do something to help those acutely affected is over, I am still processing everything we learned. Here are some of my take aways: