Dearly Beloved,
Good morning! I am a day late in getting this out, but that means that I can share the news that our Church Moderator Greg Greaves' surgery was successful yesterday -- so successful that it looks like he'll be released to go home today. Thanks for your prayers and all the thoughts you've been sending his way!
I have been reflecting quite a bit on our upcoming election and wanted to name for us that we are a purple congregation. We differ not only in our backgrounds and experience but also in some of our beliefs, our partisan affiliation (or lack thereof), whether and how we vote. Being a diverse community with a variety of experience and perspectives makes us richer and stronger.
Sure, it can be easier to be with people who all think the same as us. There is an ease and comfort to the kinds of echo chambers that our news sources and social media feeds have become, but being isolated from people who are different from us means that our own perspectives are never challenged, we do not have to seek to understand different points of view, and we are not invited to see the world, people and indeed God as any bigger than our own individual view. I loved Mary McCabe's invitation to us in her reflections about God to always think of God as being bigger than what we already know or see, that there is always more to God. That bigger, that more, is most clear when we are with people who are different from us. If we are each created in God's image, then our differences reveal the diversity, the more-ness of God.
I am aware that many of us feel incredibly anxious as we approach the election. It feels, to many of us, like a great deal is at stake. I have a feeling that whoever we elect come November 5, some of us will feel great relief and some of us will feel growing fear.
As a diverse congregation, representing the rainbow of who God is, we will hold that together. We will continue to love one another, to break bread together, to serve our neighbors to work to provide a safe and welcoming space to those among our wider society who regularly experience exclusion and oppression. We will seek to hold our relief and our fear together, and to continue to work for a congregation, community and wider society where justice, liberation, equity, healing and wholeness are accessible to all of God's beloved children.
Please don't hesitate to reach out to me for prayer or conversation as Election Day approaches.
I am holding each o you in love and in my prayers,
Thandiwe
