Friends,
Not long into quarantine a friend on a school board shared something she heard the head of school say as they were thinking about re-opening procedures: “We are living at the nexus of persistence and patience as we do our best to plan ahead.” I have very much felt to be at the intersection of persistence and patience. This is a challenging tension to live into – personally, I am much better at persistence. I love a good challenge, or a new opportunity for adaptive thinking. Patience is much more difficult, especially when life throws you into Patience’s classroom and you have no idea when class lets out. Six months in and we still aren’t sure.
As a church, I’d like us to think about the Fall in 2-month chunks: September and October being Early fall, November and December Late Fall. Two months feels like a good length of time to allow for some continuity and rhythm, while not being so long that we grow flat.
For Early Fall we will continue with the worship schedule that has worked for us this summer. 8am outdoors, 9am Forum hour, and 10am online. This allows our online service to continue to be our “principal” service, while we also take advantage of the lovely late summer weather for our outdoor 8am gathering. I have every hope of continuing outside into late October – this, of course, depending on the cold weather. Our Reopening Task Force continues to meet weekly to discuss the litany of logistics involved with indoor worship – the target for this will be early November.
If I could add one word to persistence, patience, and planning – prayerful. This COVID season, along with an extended course on patience, has taught me to trust in prayer. We do what we can – we persist, we are patient, and we plan – but ultimately, we trust God. We bring what we have – the opportunities and challenges before us, and our anxieties and hopes about them – and we offer them to God in prayer. “God, this is your world; we are you church. Here is the future we worry about; help us to trust the one you will give.”
Gratefully,
Garrett