Friends,

I have six more days off work! I have appointments with friends to play games. I am cooking New Year's Eve dinner for 35 of my neighbors. And hopefully I'll get a chance to do some quilting.

What are you doing to care for yourself?

-Liz

Introduction to Act! Be Church Now

The new year brings us a chance to restart. I'm not much for resolutions, but I do want to think about how I am going to be in this coming year. Each of us have work to do and that work will not change significantly. God's children are being hurt and God's earth is being damaged. We each have a role in care-taking.

We have gotten to a place where so much is happening that we cannot keep track of it all. This has created a sense of emergency and panic. We feel chaos and cannot find stable ground. While urgency can lead to more action, when it is over-the-top the disorder becomes disorienting.

When I write this newsletter, often a week before it will come out, there is always something new in the news, and I panic that I'm not covering the right thing for this very moment. I am distracted from my plan, veering to the newest disastrous proposal.

I heard the news of additional attacks on trans health care, which took me to read my last post on care of our trans neighbors, and then I looked up some statistics (yes, 97% of youth gender-affirming surgeries are on cis-boys). While working on that I got news that a friend was arrested at an immigrant detention center near me (for bringing food and blankets!). While looking up that news article I found Heather Cox Richardson's post on Thomas Paine, and George Washington crossing the Delaware, which lead me to look up why we don't make battleships anymore. And then I had to check on the supreme court decision to not allow troops in Chicago (duh) which required I look up the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

But I already had a topic picked out for my blog. I can, of course, change my mind on the fly.

One of the things tyranny does is make so many changes that we cannot imagine what to do next. We cannot find direction. We cannot figure out what is true, what is in in place vs. what is proposed, what has been approved and what has been found unconstitutional. Change that is planned and organized is boring and plodding, and there are valid complaints that it is too slow. But it is also something we can deal with, one thing at a time.

By instead creating chaos, our present administration not only controls the narrative, but is able to keep us uneven, off our feet. Always feeling next to a cliff. We have people we care about and we need to check on all of them. we have issues we care about and we need to know about all of them. We don't have the time to do all that needs to be done in this context.

And that leads us to the inability to act. The inability to carry through the steps of creating change. Unable to keep up the good, focused work we have started.

With all this on my mind I attended Christmas Eve worship at Waterbury United Church (UCC) in Vermont. And these are the words of the benediction.

"What Christ was, he was; what he is fated to become depends on us making a chamber in our hearts for his birth. How we choose to live will decide its meaning. Let us go out into this holy night choosing to live with joy and love at our center. Let us go out into this holy night recommitting our lives to all that is good and true, helpful and holy."

As Christians, we engage in work to change the world. But we get our steadiness, our focus, our direction from our faith.

That is my New Year’s resolution. To make space for Christ, and Christ’s message in my heart. To choose joy and love. To commit to what is good and true, what is helpful and what is holy.

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What is your church doing, or thinking about doing these days? How are you being here in your particular place? Just reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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Kim and Reggie Harris offer We All Belong to Love on their Rock of Ages album.

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Kevin Scott Hall is a parishioner at Ashburnham Congregational Church, where I was pastor. Here is his song celebrating holidays.

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