GRACE NOTESfrom Rev. Kimberley Debus This month we’ve been talking about envisioning – what is the future we seek? And more, how do we shift our thinking when things seem so terrible? As I was contemplating this question – and feeling pretty cynical, to be honest – I opened Facebook to find a post by …
GRACE NOTESfrom Rev. Kimberley Debus For a few years now, I have watched as other ministers post warnings about fake emails or texts pretending to be them, asking for gift cards or some such, with concerns about hacking, safety, and often a rush to change passwords. I wondered why I wasn’t experiencing this – until …
I don’t know about you, but I found this January to be a bigger “blah” than normal. I suspect some of it was the flu, which knocked me out for a couple of weeks. Also, for the first time in a few years, we had actual snow that made the roads messy and our backs …
Whether you watched online, in person, or were one of the players, you know our congregation was briefly overtaken by the words of Charles Dickens and perhaps his most beloved work, A Christmas Carol. Along with the fun and frivolity of the celebration, many of you heard the message of the tale – one of …
As I write this on Thursday morning, I find myself singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – thanks in part to a Facebook post extolling the virtues of the version by John Denver and the Muppets. But the version I am singing does betray my age, because it is the version by SCTV characters Bob …
There’s a phrase we sometimes use in congregational settings: “moving at the speed of church.” At its worst, it indicates how change happens sometimes excruciatingly slowly; sometimes that’s because schedules by their nature slow things down, and sometimes because people create delays and roadblocks. At its best, however, it indicates the care and attention leaders …
Here we are again, facing a great deal of uncertainty, horror, and frustration. The world just isn’t letting up, and again we are wondering what the other shoe is that’s going to drop – because we have pretty good proof that it is. (Whoever is in charge of that metaphor must be a cobbler, because …
Beloveds, I have written no less than fifteen almost-sentences to begin this message, and none have quite worked as intriguing or gentle entries into our topic today – which I am taking (finally) as a sign that it’s time for bluntness. Anti-semitism is alive and well and living in the world – both around the …
Curiosity is on my mind this week. I remember as a child, whenever a question came up at the dinner table – about history, or science, or art, or just about anything that wasn’t “how was school today?” – my father would send me to the book-lined living room with the words “go look it …
We’ve been talking about belonging this month, so of course the Dunning-Kruger effect means I keep seeing articles and memes about belonging. I ran across a blog post by consultant Julian Stodd, who works with organizations around strategy, collaboration, and social leadership. In his post, Stodd shared some questions that we might take up when …