From Rev. Billy Kluttz

Grace and peace be with you! As we remember our country’s beginnings this July 4th holiday weekend, we will consider stories of our spiritual beginnings, as well. Our sermon series, Faces of Faith, gives us the story of Genesis 2 this Sunday (to which I am adding a small portion of chapter 3). Together, we’ll remember the story of Eve and Adam’s creation, their initial connection in the garden, and the quick deterioration in human relations. I hope that you’ll join us for worship online.  We’ll also celebrate communion together online this Sunday. You’re encouraged to prepare a table in your home for worship on Sunday. Any food and drink will do to remember Jesus’ life and calling.  Stories of our human relations are also stories of grief. And so, I will leave you with a poem from Jan Richardson that we read together on Tuesday morning this week during our prayer group: Blessing for the Brokenhearted by Jan Richardson Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love. Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound, when every day our waking opens it anew. Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this— as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it, as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still, as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us Nonetheless. Peace, Billy