For ten years I biked home from work, 7 miles up High Street.  A bike route no longer than that was one house hunting need last year, and I enjoyed a 6-mile ride home daily until the Covid lockdown. The shortest route took me up Cleveland Avenue to 17th, then a quick dogleg onto Ontario and straight through Linden Park to my house.  Then renovation of that run-down park started last summer, with complete fencing that forced me onto streets I’d not ridden before and past a house with the small front yard given to raised garden beds, a sight that fired happy synapses. Days later I quickly slowed to a stop when I saw a woman tending the garden, introduced myself, discovered an enthusiastic gardener who’d eliminated front lawn and completely covered the rear of her property in thick wood chips for transition to permaculture food growing and habitat

During this pandemic, we lament the loss of ballroom dancing.  Square dancing was very popular in the 1970s while I was stationed at Minot AFB, ND.  In between the squares, the caller would “cue” round dances.  Round dancing is choreographed ballroom dancing to a particular popular song and covers all the standard rhythms like waltz, foxtrot, bolero, cha-cha, tango, etc.  Combined dancing was on Friday nights and classes for round dancing only were held on Wednesday nights.  A beginner’s class had just started.  My wife Sally had been working in the ceramics shop in the basement of the rec center and stopped in when she heard the music. She had gone to USO dances at Chanute AFB in Illinois for several years before she joined the USAF.  We began dating with a shared love of dancing and the rest is history as we will be celebrating our 45th anniversary next

The theme for our worship services for 7 Sundays in July and August is Parables.  The parables told by Jesus in the bible are familiar to us, but can new parables be used to teach spiritual truths in the current day?  Worship Commission decided to invite writers to create modern-day parables to present in our worship services. How would you have handled this assignment? We gave the writers these parameters for their modern-day parable: 1. center your parable around a wisdom teaching; 2. either write your own parable or retell an existing parable in terms of modern culture; 3. start your parable with the words “The kingdom of God…”; 4. your parable should take between 30 seconds and 3 minutes to read. I got the job of inviting writers for the task.  But before I could ask, I wanted to know what I was asking them to do.  I researched

Amidst the many losses of the Covid era, I keep coming back to something spiritual writer Richard Rohr wrote years back and reiterated this past spring as it was becoming clear the pandemic would alter church life for the foreseeable future.  What wrote however many years ago was that he wished congregations could cancel all programming for a year and simply learn how to pray.  At the end of the year they could decide which programs served as extensions of their prayers and which were superfluous. Richard Rohr’s prayers/wishes are apparently quite powerful because that year has arrived (I am aware that is horrible theology, but….that year has arrived nonetheless). In my better moments, rather than being ever-aware of what we can’t now do, I ponder whether this is a year for all of us to learn how to pray.  Joel