This message is available as a video, and as a letter.
Dear WellSprings,
This past weekend, we all lost an hour of our lives, when Daylight Savings Time pushed the clocks forward. This Sunday, we’re giving you that hour back.
To be honest, this wasn’t our plan. One of our lay preachers was scheduled to offer the message this weekend – but called me on Monday, stressed and fried like so many of us are, asking if it was possible to make a last-minute swap. All of that is fine – life happens – and most of the time, a swap is exactly what we do in situations like this. But for reasons that I won’t bore you with here… it just so happened that none of our other preachers were available to fill in.
As I thought about other options for bringing you a message this Sunday, I realized the best one by far, for all of our volunteers and our staff, would be to take a break. To model, in fact, exactly what our lay preacher was doing – recognizing and honoring that it has been a long year. I realized that rather than push ourselves past the breaking point, we can show by example that we do have other options, if we collectively choose to embrace them. It’s okay to cry uncle when we need to, to accept that we are not machines, and to take some time to rest and recover.
In some ways, this is the perfect message to follow up on what I shared last weekend. We are in the midst of the one-year anniversary of the “moment the world stopped.” This is a good time for us to pause and remember – and, as Julio Gambuto said, in that article I shared last Sunday, to “think deeply about what you want to put back into your life.”
So, this weekend, we will give you that hour back. There will be no YouthSpirit, and no worship service on Sunday, March 21st. Instead, we’re inviting our whole community to spend some time on Sunday morning reflecting, and digging into all of the excellent, soul-searching prompts and questions about the year we’ve all just lived through, in the resource guide from our Spiritual Development Ministry. Ms. Carol has put together a few resources for rest and meditation for young children, as well.
Pull out a notebook, maybe, and write out your responses. Gather with your family around the kitchen table, or go for a walk with a friend, and dig into the questions together. At 10am, we’ll premiere a short video on our YouTube channel, showing you where to find the guide, and setting you off on your mission. Then, at 11am, we’ll have a different kind of Coffee Hour on Zoom: time for sharing and talking together in small groups, about what came up in our reflections at home.
Of course, you can join us for this, or you can use your time on Sunday to do whatever feeds your soul. Catch up on an old service you may have missed. Visit another UU congregation – it’s easier than ever, these days! All I ask is that you do something that is healing and restorative for you – and that will leave you, just 60 minutes later, feeling a little bit more charged full with the charge of the soul.
I’ll see you on Sunday, at 11. May we all feel a little more rested, by then. ❤
Rev. Lee