Who have been your most influential teachers? All types of teachers — at school, at church, at work and in families — help shape who we become. We are grateful for all our teachers.
I’m a small child in a crib, struggling to breathe in the night, clogged up with what will turn out to be allergies and asthma. My crying rouses my parents, who take turns responding.
On this Health Awareness and Day of Prayer for Healing and Wholeness, it seems clear that most people who read this will have been acutely aware of their own health and that of their loved ones and indeed, perfect strangers, as we have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic in the past 11 months. The challenges posed by the restrictions and practices we have followed have brought far-reaching and long-lasting changes to nearly every aspect of our individual and communal lives. Issues of racial and economic injustice have demanded our attention and action. As a result, we have been lifting up prayers for healing and wholeness for a world that has known trauma and loss as we seek to carry on and support one another in the midst of this time of heartache and brokenness.
Each year, site coordinators of the Young Adult Volunteer Program expect challenges. There are new participants, new personalities, new issues each year. But Maureen Anderson, site coordinator for New York City, faced some truly unique challenges this year serving at the U.S. epicenter of a global pandemic.
It’s been only a few months since Covenant Presbyterian Church in Fort Myers, Florida, worked with a professional beekeeper to relocate a couple of well-established bee colonies from an old rotten tree on the property. The bees were successfully moved to side-by-side hives in the church’s Together We Grow Mission Garden.
Congregations of many denominations extend the peace of Christ with a blessing during their service. “The peace of Christ be with you (and also with you).” It is a blessing offered and a blessing returned in kind. The peace of Christ is part of what our faith offers to us. Extending the peace of Christ is part of an active, engaged faith — a witness to what it means for us to be building the household of God.
As a scientist and science lover since he was a child, Fred Hanna has always found the disconnect between science and religion to be odd, if not utterly horrifying. Once, in his early 30s, he was having a conversation about dinosaurs with a Christian who told him, “Dinosaurs aren’t real. They were made up. Science made them up.”
When author and artist P. Lynn Miller proposed the theme of “lament” to the national Bible Study Committee of Presbyterian Women four years ago, no one had any idea how timely the topic would be now.
