Faith in Progress

July 15, 2018 Amos 7:7-15 And the Lord said to Amos, “What do you see?”  I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen. A while back my husband Holden spent his free time for a few months finishing part of our basement.  With a lot of hard work, he turned it from a dark and dingy place full of pipes and insulation and wires  to a relatively light and comfortable place for the kids to play.  It was an amazing accomplishment. The problem is that you have to go down a set of stairs to get there.  And it turns out that when Holden framed the stairs, something didn’t work out quite as planned, and the 5 th stair from the bottom ended up about a 1/2 inch taller than it ought to be.   It seems like such a small difference – you can barely even tell by looking at the stairs that that one step is a touch different.   But just about every person – child or adult – who goes up our basement stairs trips on t...

July 1, 2018 Mark 5:21-43 I’ve now been working here at St. Paul’s for exactly a month, and — I cannot tell a lie — it has been something of a whirlwind.  You all have been so welcoming and friendly, but there are a lot of you and your names are awfully slippery!  The staff is helpful and funny, and I’m starting to catch on to who does what.  I’m learning how lots of machines work (though it’s possible that Greg Milliken’s name may always live on my internal voicemail).  I’m beginning to get a sense of the systems — everything from how documents are shared in the Google Drive to the process of bulletin creation.  I’ve been getting immersed in wedding preparation and baptisms, pastoral care and outreach, liturgy formation, and the workings of your amazingly dedicated vestry.  But I’m fairly certain I’ve only begun to do what lies at the heart of this job.  Meanwhile, my family is still very much in the process of figuring how things will work w...