This coming Sunday, I will serve as guest preacher to two yoked congregations in a Northern California farming community.
I’m a city girl.
This is only my second season of gardening (and the tomatoes are coming on very nicely, thank you).
At one point in my life, I used to serve the voters of House District 11 in Southwest Portland as an elected member of the Oregon House of Representatives. This was a very powerful life changing experience for so many reasons but one was the process of sitting down with rural communities and their elected representatives to figure out what their life was like and what they needed from their state government. One year I spent an August afternoon riding around in a wheat combine and visiting farmers during the harvest. I have spent time on a fishing boat in doing circles in Newport Bay till everyone got organized for the blessing of the fleet, (the analogy of herding cats is very much in order here). I have spent time in a small logging town in the coastal range listening to people struggling to keep their way of life in a time when logging is disappearing and farming is getting too competitive.