Dearly Beloved,
It is good to be church together! If you forgot to bring water this past Sunday for our living water worship or weren't here, please know that you can add water to what we've blessed at any time during the year.
I've been appreciating getting to go back and listen to Pastor Delaney's messages and watch the testimonies that were shared. In one of their July sermons, Delaney focuses on the disciples and their question of Jesus: "Teach us how to pray." How do we pray? How does Jesus teach us to pray in the Lord's Prayer? In prayer, we hold both God's closeness (in the Lord's Prayer addressing God as Abba/Father/Daddy/Parent) and God's otherness ("hallowed/holy be thy name"). Prayer is an act of surrender and openness, a proclamation of our trust in the Holy One to be ever present.
And the truth is that praying in these ways looks different for different people. For some of us, our best praying is quiet, for some it in out loud or in conversation, for some of us it is with our feet or fingers on a labyrinth, for some it is in song, for some of us we feel closest to God as we move or dance, for some of us we can most easily open ourselves and surrender in moments of stillness. Because different ways of praying resonate differently with different people, we seek as a congregation to offer different ways of praying during different seasons. For some of us, the time of sharing joys and concerns aloud is the most important part of our worship service while for some of us it feels clunky and distracting.
This season, we are inviting you to pray in song, in stillness, by engaging in our prayer stations where you can write a prayer (joy or concern), you can release a prayer in water, you can draw/color a prayer, or you can light a candle. I will read the written prayers aloud as we close our prayer time and will also invite people to share a word, a name, a situation or a place to lift up together. I've added "worry stones" to our prayer station tables, and you are welcome to hold these during service if you are holding worries that you want to turn over to Christ. I also know that there are some of us who pray with our knitting or crochet needles each Sunday during worship.
Being open to different ways of holding space for prayer together is one of the ways that we hold and celebrate and make room for difference within our congregation. And, come Advent, we'll go back to sharing our joys & concerns aloud together during worship.
I'm grateful to be with all of you again and grateful for the ways in which we hold and carry one another in prayer.
With love,
Thandiwe
