Ancient.

Hello, friends near and far! Life here in Fallon, Nevada is good. Full of the joys and sorrows and successes and disappointments and busyness and quiet of ordinary life. I pray that your life is full, and rich, and good. It won't be all happiness and sunshine, of course. This moment might be especially difficult, even. But I hope that it is good, even so.

I may have mentioned at some point (probably at several points) that I was born with a very strange attachment to old things. The ordinary lives lived by ordinary people long before I was born, and the things they left behind that they used, touched, lived in, loved. Like letters. And the pressed flowers I found in the 100+ year old hymnal Dennis and I found in an antique shop. And the old kitchen things, with wear marks from long use. I remember going to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose
when I was 11 or 12, and the tour guide pointed out to us which parts of the house were original and which had been replaced or "restored," and it gave me goosebumps to see the wear patterns in the floors and on the bannisters. It irritated me to no end that we weren't allowed to touch them. I remember feeling the same way the first time I saw grinding rocks outside Portola, California, and when my friend Becky and I stopped by the Fallon museum and got to take a tour of the cave at Grimes Point. I don't know what it is, but that connection to grandmothers and brothers and little girls and young men generations and centuries and millennia ago is something I have always found incredibly powerful.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the joy of spending a couple of days at the Kings Beach Methodist Retreat Center with the pastors of the northern Nevada Methodist churches, and our spouses. We had a little bit of stuff planned, but mostly we just planned to socialize and cook and enjoy each other's company. On Wednesday morning, Pastor Betty Weiser of Yerington and Smith Valley UMC led us in a brief workshop about prayer. We experienced several different kinds of prayer, but I was particularly drawn to the prayer beads. Now, if you have spent any time around me at all, you know that my hands shake constantly; anything that takes very careful, fine-motor-skills kinds of work can be next to impossible for me. I cannot *tell you* how irritating I find it sometimes. But somehow I managed to thread the Godblessed things with their tiny, tiny holes onto the tiny, tiny wire, and get the incredibly tiny metal crimp beads into the right place, and I only had to have Betty fix it once, and

I was only briefly tempted to throw it across the room and give up on the whole Godblessed project, when lo and behold it was done and we sat down to pray. And I was overwhelmed as I prayed with this sense of connectedness to people just like me, hundreds and thousands of years ago, clutching beads like these to guide their devotion. For we are surrounded, someone wrote 2000 years ago in a letter to the Hebrews, by a great cloud of witnesses...and those witnesses were brave, and flawed, and good ordinary people with loves and losses and short tempers and shaking hands and a desperate need for God.

I've carried those beads with me in my pocket every day since.

For the past few weeks, we at Epworth UMC have been praying with and talking about and learning from the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. We have spent time with Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We have learned from them what God's priorities were, what God's frustrations were, and where hope was to be found even in times of desperate struggle. We have learned something about the character of God: mysterious and strange and awe-some, powerful and righteous and just, loving, forgiving, and merciful. We have been made uncomfortably aware of how similar we are, and how similar our mistakes and sinful tendencies are to those who lived and worshiped so long ago. And those are good reasons to read and study the prophets. But the biggest reason, the most important reason, is that Jesus is there.

Right there. In the Word of God spoken and heard and written down hundreds of years before he was born. Right there.

That's why they matter, those words written so long ago. It's easy to dismiss and discard old things, and replace them with something new. But what is new is rooted in all that went before. That's true in Biblical history, it's true in our families, and it's true in our Christian faith. It may not give you goosebumps the weird way it does me, but God is there in all of it, waiting to be encountered, powerfully present yesterday, today, and forever.

Tomorrow morning in worship, we will spend some time with the prophets Hosea and Amos. They are each pretty short books, so I hope you are able to find some time to read them this week. Take them a little bit at a time, in the quiet if you can. Pray before you open your Bible, and while you're reading, and after you've finished for the day. You will find that God will surprise you in it, grab your attention, and have something to say to you. Because though this Bible is the very, very old Word of an impossibly ancient God, it is a living thing, new every moment.

Tomorrow morning at 9am we begin with music and prayer. At around 9:30am you can find us on the radio at KVLV 99.3FM or 980AM, or live on my Facebook page (Dawn Blundell). See you in worship. :-)

Love and blessings,
Pastor Dawn