Song: How I long for Peace | UCC workshop on Global Peace |

Friends,

My doctor is repairing my right achilles tendon today. I arrive at the hospital at 11:30 am. I was hoping for an earlier time!

Full recovery will be 18 months, but for my left foot I was walking with crutches after 2 weeks and exercising after 8 weeks. Hopefully this surgery will go as well as the last one. Since it's my right foot I won't be able to drive for awhile, but the real test is if I can ski in December.

-Liz

Hope? Despair?

I can't decide if the world is getting better or worse right now. There is a general excitement that perhaps the election results will good, and I hope that is true.

What I do know is that for the immigrants in ICE detention, and for the immigrants who are afraid, right now is bad. For the people struggling to take care of their children with disabilities, the cuts to in-home care are not okay. For the trans kids afraid to be themselves, now is not a good time. For people who are living on the edge of making it, grocery bills will put them into the "not okay" category. Programs cut because they had the words "DEI" in their proposals are still gone. We are still at war.

It is easy to find despair.

What is our calling as Christians when we are feeling is despair? Isn't this the religion of hope?

We can turn to Ecclesiastes, to Lamentations, and to Job to be assured that we are not the first of God's people to feel despair. Ecclesiastes suggest life is unpredictable and only simple living and awe of God can comfort us. Lamentations is simply meant to offer assurance that God's grace is still present--even we you can't see it--in the most extreme suffering. Job suggests what we already know--that we cannot understand God. Many of the psalmists lament God's absence or hiddenness, but mostly end with the story turning: the writer trusts that God is with us after all.

It is not helpful, and is sometimes harmful, to turn to quickly to hope that it will all work out. It doesn't feel realistic. It can feel like it is ignoring the real people who are suffering, will bear even more burdens, and will die from the consequences of our present polity. The fact is, even if things are getting better, there are people suffering.

Instead, we hold firm to the reality is that we don't know if things will improve. Our hope is not in the promise of a turn-around. Our hope is in the promise that God is with us. God, who chose to be human, knows what our suffering is like. God cries with us in our pain and is trying to guide us to make things better. God has not turned their back, but rather is nearby, ready to hold us and comfort us.

The end is not near. And yet God is.

What is your church doing, or thinking about doing these days? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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A Global Peacemaking discussion offered by the UCC. Two 1 hour sessions, the first on September 24.

Crys Matthews' song How I Long for Peace. She is one of my favorites at Wild Goose. (3:36)

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