May 19, 2022

Dear friends,

There is so much celebration going on. It’s the end of the school year, and what a year it has been. When school started parents were not allowed in buildings and masked were required for my three daughters and their schools. It was a point of anxiety for me. I love to go to the schools, eat lunch with my girls, meet the other parents, and help the teachers with whatever they need. I’ve read books to classes, helped build garden beds, and showed up for the plays. But this year I couldn’t. I also didn’t know if any of those extra things were even going to happen.

But we made it work. We grew and adjusted and changed all throughout the year, and so with school ending at the end of this week, there has been a lot of celebrating. Celebration for the completion of the year. Celebration that summer break is coming. And with celebration comes a lot of noise and over-scheduled calendars. It's good, it’s just busy. It’s a good kind of busy because it’s a busyness we haven’t really gotten to experience in a while. But it is still busy.

I am reading a mediation book by the great theologian and mystic, Howard Thurman. In one of those devotions, he says, “Sometimes there are ragings of anxiety, of hurts that we do not want to see disappear. They provide excellent opportunities to bolster up our own ego or own sense of faltering security. This fact must not blind us to the great power that there is in what is here referred to as the central stillness. For it in the quiet which invades us, and which becomes a characteristic of our total respiration that we are most acutely aware of the operation of the Presence of God.”

The “busy season” will be over soon. We have wrapped up a capital funds campaign. Schools are letting out for summer. Vacations are on the horizon. I am praying for a season of rest. Not so we can rejuvenate to become busy again, but so we can live in the presence of God and know the power and truth that is in our central stillness.

Peace,

Jordan