New Year and Sabbath Rest

Happy New Year, beloved of God!

I love my drive to work, and home again. It would be much more convenient, and probably smarter in several ways, if Dennis and I lived here in Fallon rather than in Fernley, but if we did I would miss the drive. As I came in this morning, I was especially aware of the peacefulness of it...thirty minutes or so in the quiet, to relax and pray and listen to the radio. After the rain yesterday, everything looked and smelled clean and good. The snow on the mountains around us is beautiful this time of year, too.

As I drove, my mind wandered to the First Nations people who lived here hundreds and even thousands of years ago, when the land looked much different. And the pioneers who passed through this desert 180 years ago or so, looking for adventure and prosperity and a new life. And the people who decided this harsh but beautiful desert river valley would be a good place to stop, and make a home. And the people who decided what they needed most of all was a church.

Last Sunday in worship, before the sermon, we talked a little bit about the Wolf Center and the church and the different ministries we do, and how we wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for folks decades and generations ago who worked and prayed and gave what they had to serve the Lord. It was a previous conversation that got me thinking about it, with a woman at a graveside service for her good friend. She pulled me aside and handed me a donation for the church, and expressed how good and kind the church had been when she had attended events here in the past, and how much she appreciates the things we do. She said, specifically, that our facility (she meant the Wolf Center, mostly) was a great blessing to the community. Thank God, I thought, for those whose faithfulness and vision made it a reality.

This new year, that’s what’s on my heart. What legacy are we leaving for those who will follow us? What blessing are we creating now that they will benefit from, and grow with? As you pray, and worship, and study, and serve the Lord in your own way, I hope that you will consider that all of it matters. Not just for you, but for everyone you meet who will sense that little spark of God-light in you. 

Nurture that light, friends. Let God lead you, and fill your life with a renewed sense of belovedness, and purpose. 

In God’s amazing grace,

Pastor Dawn

Worship at Epworth and at Home

Sabbath Rest

Aaaaaahhhhhhh. After the busyness of the Christmas season, January can be a lovely sort of re-set. Some of us might be thinking about new ways to do things in the coming year, and we here in the church office are no exception. Worship in January will focus on that: how to really love the Lord our God by nurturing a healthy heart, mind, soul, and body. This Sunday, we will begin with a renewal of our life in faith, beginning with a re-commitment to keeping the Sabbath holy. 

 

Worship will meet in person, at 9:00am in our sanctuary for those who prefer, and on Facebook and KVLV at 9:30am. We can give GREAT thanks to God that, due to our care in sanitizing and masking and whatnot, we have had NO spreading of the virus in our church, even though a couple of members have gotten the virus elsewhere. 

Keep it up, beloved! It is a great way to follow God’s commandment to love one another.

Creation. Uncreation. Re-creation. Harvest

Hello, beloved church family and friends!

This week at Epworth UMC we finish our worship series about...well, the entire meaning and purpose of life, I suppose. The wonder of God’s good creation, the way everything got broken, God’s power to fix it, and our place in it all. On Sunday we will give thanks for all of that, and consider our own place in God's world and God's plan...our own little piece of creation that we get to care for; our corner of the Kindom of God that we get to help build. Our scripture this week comes from Jesus' final message to his disciples on the eve of his arrest...you'll find it in John 15, verse 5. As you get ready for Sunday, you might like to take some time praying with and reading this passage and the chapter around it:

"I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing."

Last Sunday was World Communion Sunday, which is one of my favorite non-holiday things. We didn’t spend a lot of time in worship talking about it this year because we had other things we needed to focus on, but it is a great joy to me. I find it inspiring to be in fellowship with people of vastly different faiths, and to see how other Christians around the world worship and express their faith. I can count scores of times when my own faith and the practice of it has grown and deepened thanks to time spent with people who believe and worship very differently from me. That’s why it’s so important to me to find ways to work together with the other churches and pastors here in Fallon, Christian or not, and to fellowship and serve together in whatever ways we can. It warms my heart in a way that few other things do, and I feel the presence of God in it powerfully. As you read our column in the Fallon Post (click here to find the latest one https://www.thefallonpost.org/news/2377,faith-and-life-a-column-from-local-faith-leaders) or participate in different ecumenical or interfaith projects, I hope you are inspired by it, too.

World Communion Sunday was begun in 1933 by the pastor of a little Presbyterian church in Baltimore. As they described it at the time, it was their “attempt to bring churches together in a service of Christian unity... to know how important the Church of Jesus Christ is, and how each congregation is interconnected one with another.” Paul’s description of the body of Christ in his several letters (1 Cor. 12 is one example) doesn’t just apply to individual members in a particular congregation, but also to the different expressions of the Christian faith across time and around the world. No church or denomination is perfect in its understanding of God nor its practice of faith, including our own; rather than being in competition with or opposition to each other, we gain a great deal when we remember that we are all vital parts of the Body of Christ with our own corner of the Garden to cultivate and care for.

One of the things we talked about on Sunday was the example of a woman named Wilma Mankiller, who served as the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in the 1980s and 1990s. In reading about her life and her unshakeable Christian and traditional Cherokee faith, I was reminded of a beautiful prayer in our United Methodist Book of Worship that comes from the Lakota people. You may know it as the Great Spirit Prayer; it was translated into English in 1887 by Chief Yellow Lark. I know you will hear the echoes of our own Christian faith in it, and I hope that it inspires your time in prayer this week as it does mine.

“Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the wind, whose breath gives life to all the world. Hear me; I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things you have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Help me to remain calm and strong in the face of all that comes towards me. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. Help me seek pure thoughts and act with the intention of helping others. Help me find compassion without empathy overwhelming me. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy: myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes. So when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.”

Especially as we consider what part of the Garden we have been given by God to cultivate, I find the peace and wisdom and humility of this prayer deeply meaningful. 

Have a wonderful week, friends. I pray that God is blessing you richly, and that you find yourself surprised by touches of divine grace each day.

In faith, hope, and love,

Pastor Dawn

A Response to President Trump's Open Churches Order

Dear readers,

Yesterday morning (Friday the 22^nd), I posted a video devotion that began with an announcement that we are having drive-in church. Though it’s nowhere near as good as being physically together in worship, it is certainly a good step in the right direction. I spent the rest of the day finalizing the arrangements for that (thanks, Grant, Steve, Jake, and Jackie for your help!), and writing a letter to our neighbors to let them know it’s happening. When I got home, I saw news about President Trump’s order that churches be open. Whew, things happen fast in a pandemic!

Friends, you have heard me say how much I deeply miss being in worship together, and I know you do, too. I go through periods of deep sadness not seeing the faces of so many wonderful people, and sharing hugs, and singing and laughing together. My heart breaks especially that we can’t grieve and support each other in the ways we so deeply need...phone calls and video chats are just not the same. And as much as I have become accustomed (sort of) to preaching to a camera and just envisioning your faces in the pews while I do so, I’ll be honest: it is no fun at all. I miss your input, your feedback, your laughter and tears and furrowed brows and impatience when I talk too long. I miss singing together! Church is absolutely not about the building, and worship is not confined to any particular place; God is much too powerful and real for that. But I am more aware than ever that something deeply holy happens when we worship TOGETHER. Something that happens nowhere else, in no other setting. The presence of Jesus Christ when the body of believers gathers together in worship is a miraculous thing.

But. And. The fact that worship has shifted to our homes does NOT mean that the Church has ever been closed. The Church has always been praying, and worshiping, and loving, and serving, Nothing but nothing could stop that. And I love you all far too much to rush us coming back to in-person worship before we can do so safely. 

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement, our Bishops (along with local pastors and faith leaders all over the country) published their responses. Attached is the one from our Bishop Minerva Carcano, and a few other things that I found helpful. Our Bishop and the Cabinet are working hard to put guidelines together for us, to help us provide a safe place to worship. We will need time to put good practices into place, and our District Superintendent will need time to see that they are done well, before we will be given the green light. Each church in town will open on a different timeline, so you may see some open before we do, and others open after; please be in prayer for all of us, as we do our best to make the right decisions for our community. 

In the meantime, as always, I and the members of Epworth UMC crave your prayers and your patient understanding. Our perceptions of this pandemic and how to navigate it intelligently and care-fully, our reactions to President Trump and the priorities of this current administration, our opinions about how and when to hold in-person worship services again all vary widely among us, for very good reasons. I pray that we resist the temptation to settle into “camps.” I pray that we assume the best in each other, and remember that even when our understandings and reactions differ they are rooted in deep, deep faith and a desire for things we all want: freedom, health, happiness, and the joy of worshiping together. Pray often, beloved, more often than ever. And above all, love one another. It is the primary way we express our love for God (Matthew 25:40, Matthew 22:36-40; John 15:12).

See you on Sunday for drive-in worship! Online, too, on Zoom at 9am and then on Facebook Live and KVLV AM980 at 9:30.

Leaning on His everlasting arms,

Pastor Dawn

http://calnev-email.brtapp.com/viewemail/2604282

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organizations/index.html

http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/ncc-urges-churches-to-exercise-extreme-caution-before-re-opening/?fbclid=IwAR3c5z242uX4IKTB__PUCTF-WUvJjJJ3LrXZdWVwv4CNUUSlj0pXIoy_JjQ

The Inner Room

"But when you pray, go into your inner room, close the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." ~Matthew 6:6

One of the many things we learned on our recent trip to Israel was a bit more about the meaning of this passage, so often read at Ash Wednesday. It comes, this teaching of Jesus, in the midst of a long sermon characterized by a call for deeper, more authentic faith. On the strength of this passage, religious people in the early church (and today, too) set aside a small, dark space like a closet in their homes where they could go to pray. John Wesley is known to have spent the first 2 hours of every day in a space like this, beginning at 4am. (I was reading recently that his mother Susanna, not having the benefit of such a space within their home and maybe being a bit hesitant to lock herself away in a closet with so many children running around -- she had 19, though 9 died in infancy -- just threw her apron over her head and sat in a chair in the kitchen to pray.) All of this is very good, but our guide in Israel gave us some really interesting information that lends some color and deeper meaning to Jesus' command here. As we looked at the stone remnants of homes and neighborhoods in the area of what was probably Peter's mother-in-law's home, he explained that the front room of the average home was for guests to be welcomed and shown hospitality. The next room in was the sleeping area and/or kitchen area, and then at the back of the home the storage area and stable. The word Jesus uses in the passage about praying in secret refers to this store room: quiet and dark, and not part of the busy-ness of the ordinary day. Jesus' instruction here is not about setting aside a special prayer room but about ensuring yourself uninterrupted space and privacy. Today, this could be anywhere...and really, in a certain sense Susanna Wesley came closest to what Jesus meant here.

Prayer closets are still cool, though.

You may have heard me at one time or another mention that I once considered being a hermit. As a child, I fantasized about living in a tiny house in the woods with only God and the animals for company, living off whatever I could harvest or grow myself. Sometimes I thought it might be pretty cool to live in a monastery, one of the ones where the women worship and work and eat together but rarely if ever speak, and where they spend the majority of their time alone in prayer. As I got older I discovered that this wasn't my call, not exactly, but there is still a yearning in me for the quiet and the solitude and the structure and the uninterrupted time with God. So during Lent, I am making a special effort to make room for that in my own life: an inner room in my home and my time, to attend to the inner room of the heart.

All of us are made differently, and so your own yearnings might be very different, but this need to attend to the inner room of the heart is a universal thing. Only you and God will know what your own heart most needs...whether it is a new kind of service, a stretch in giving, a time of fasting, a commitment to more regular Bible study or worship, or something else. Whatever it is, the point is to make room: to be vulnerable and even a bit afraid, so that space is made to be face to face with God. And whatever it is, prayer is most certainly a part of it.

Hundreds of years ago, and in some monasteries today, the daily life of religious people was marked by certain specific times of prayer. It was, and is, an effort to obey Paul's exhortation to pray without ceasing...a constant interruption of daily activity to build the habit of being prayerful in every moment, in every activity. A few years ago, Rachel Held-Evans wrote in a blog post about giving up sleeping in for Lent, and how much she learned by getting up before dawn to pray in the darkness. I couldn't help but be reminded, as I read that, of the Muslim call to prayer we heard at 5:15am every morning in Jerusalem, which in turn reminded me of the church bells at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the bells at humble Christian monasteries around the world that call the faithful to prayer at dawn, at 9am, at noon, at 3pm, at 6pm, and at 9pm before bed. In some places, the bells are also rung at midnight and 3am. It's called "praying the hours," and I am inspired to pray this way during Lent. The beautiful Arabic music in Jerusalem so early every morning was a song that declared love of God and encouraged prayer saying "prayer is better than sleep, prayer is better than sleep." I'm not sure whether I will successfully manage the midnight and 3am prayers -- though as I age, frankly I am awake at those hours more often than not anyway -- but I am inspired to try.

One ancient tradition is to read and meditate on a psalm at each time of prayer. For those who pray 5

times per day, that means all the psalms are read in 30 days. In village churches and monasteries there are simple liturgies, prayers, and hymns that go along with the hours; at home or in private, you can structure the time however you'd like. Google "praying the hours" and you will find lots of resources to guide you...or, just choose a private, quiet place to pray however your heart leads you.

May this season be one of deep, soul-healing renewal for you, friends. Whatever you try, know that God will join you in it, and will make that inner room a place of joy and peace, "vast, spacious, and plentiful" (Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582).

In God's steadfast love,
Pastor Dawn

Oh, and PS...in worship this season we will be talking about the 5 essential practices of the Christian life, based on Jesus' own walk of faith. Join us Sundays at 9am at Epworth UMC in Fallon, NV for worship, or at 9:30ish on Facebook Live or KVLV radio for just the sermon. Click here to find our Epworth UMC Facebook page.

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

In the Potter's Hands

Happy Saturday evening, friends!

It has been a good week in the Blundell household, and a good week in ministry. After a powerful, prayer-filled, exhausting couple days of work with some other pastors around our Conference at the Jesuit Conference Center in Los Altos, I was glad to spend some time gardening, and baking, and being with Mr Dennis. The time away was profound, but it was good to be home. While I was away with these 10 other pastors and our Fearless Leaders, we heard about the ways God is working in communities all around California and Nevada, heard the ways God is inspiring new ministries and re-invigorating existing ones, and prayed with and for each other. It is cathartic, this work...a potent


exercise in putting ourselves fully in God's hands, and doing the deep soul-work that relationship with God requires. So a couple of days to rest and breathe and be was also very, very good. And then, I was blessed to do some visiting, to study Scripture for worship tomorrow, to do some planning for the fall, and to look for ways we can better be God's hands and feet to each other and to our neighbors. I was so thankful to attend the PEO fundraiser last night, spending time in a beautiful setting to raise money for scholarships for women and girls, to drive around town with Mr Dennis for no reason at all, to talk with church leaders about the upcoming Chrysalis flight (it's a retreat weekend of laughter and food and storytelling and prayer for teenagers and young adults), and to pray toward all God has in store for us together. It has been a good week, with touches of God everywhere.

In the taste of fresh tomatoes and peppers and peaches and melons, grown in gardens by farmers and home gardeners, whose hands are covered in earth and whose bones are full of the love of their work.

In time spent on the grounds of a place whose walls echo with 100 years of prayer and music and devotion.

In the blessings of home, and husband, and hairy, slobbery dogs. Familiar sights and sounds and touches.

In missing my mom, and being even more grateful for her now, and understanding her better, than before she died.

In the biggest, most brightly colored dragonflies I have ever seen, chasing each other overhead and driving the dogs nuts.

In the heat that makes us slow, and adds life and warmth and growth to everything. And in the air conditioning that some blessed soul invented.

In people praying together, striving together, encouraging and uplifting and serving each other.

So many blessings. I hope your week has been good, too. It's bound to have had its joys and its difficulties, more one than the other. I hope that you have seen the Holy Spirit's comforting, encouraging, challenging, standing-up-for-you Presence all over the place.

Tomorrow we come, at the end of the week and at the beginning, to our sabbath rest. We will hear from Jeremiah, the reluctant Weeping Prophet, whose heart breaks at the failure of people to trust in God...and whose heart is full of the love of God and those same people, preaching a profound and powerful word of grace.

You might like to open your bible tonight or tomorrow morning, and read a bit of Jeremiah. Or Lamentations. Maybe Jeremiah 18:1-7, for example. Or Lamentations 3:19-24. Or start from the beginning, and read until God grabs your attention. Sit with it awhile, and see what God may have to say to you through it. It will prepare your heart and mind for worship, and lead you to come in to your sabbath worship expectant. Because God always, always shows up.

See you in worship, fellow seekers.

In the steadfast love of God,
Pastor Dawn

It Only Takes a Spark

Hello friends!

It is a gorgeous early summer day in Fallon, Nevada, and a wild and crazy day at a wonderfully busy church. Our time today has been filled with guests for different reasons, and tastes and touches of different ministries. Sweet little curly-haired kids waiting for their adopted grandma (sorry, that's "Memaw", she says) to finish her (SO appreciated) volunteer work here in the office. Big, strong cowboys setting up for a celebration of life tomorrow afternoon. Volunteers taking inventory to see what we need grocery-wise for next week's community meals. Our long-lost wonderful church secretary, back after months away to get our office life back in order (PRAISE THE LORD). Folks coming in to tidy up inside and out. Folks just popping in to say hello. It has been loud, and a little bit chaotic, as you can probably imagine...and it reminds me what a joy it is to be in ministry here.

This Sunday in worship, we begin a new worship series using movies as modern-day parables. There are a whole lot of reasons why I personally love to do this.

• Jesus gave some of his most powerful lessons by telling stories. So did the prophets before him. It is a great way to broaden our understanding of God, and ourselves...a very effective way to inspire our spiritual imagination to see where God is alive and active in everyday life.
• CS Lewis wrote in his Chronicles of Narnia that he introduced children to Jesus via wonderful stories and magical lands so that they would learn to recognize Jesus when they met him in real life. In the same way, stories can open closed minds and hearts in powerful ways, allowing us to meet Jesus again for the first time.
• I absolutely love it when I am listening to music or watching a movie or reading a story and God speaks through it. Whether the original author intended it or not, I love when God makes God's way in unexpectedly. I love that kind of surprise.
• It's a great excuse to spend time with friends and family! And as a bonus, we get to support the Fallon Theatre, too.

Our movie this week is "Star Wars: The Last Jedi." Star Wars is a funny thing, I am discovering: people seem to love it, or have no interest in it at all. And for Star Wars purists, this particular installment is especially irritating. But wow, does it have an outstanding message! Several, actually. We watched it this week at the Fallon Theatre (which is looking great, by the way, and serving pizza and bagel dogs along with their usual excellent selection of movie snacks and popcorn), but if you missed it not to worry! It's available on Amazon to watch on your computer, and it's for sale at WalMart. Probably it is also available on Redbox. If you can watch the movie before worship on Sunday, that would be great! But if you're not able, or you hate movies, or you hate THIS movie, fear not: it won't detract at all from your experience of worship. Since we are really talking about the Bible, and God in Jesus Christ, you don't have to worry about being able to follow along. The movie is just a metaphor we are using. Trust me.

But if you DO get a chance to watch it, pray first, and keep your eyes and ears open for a few things. Look for themes of power, and self-sacrifice. Success and failure. Destructive and lifegiving kinds of anger. Redemption. Parenthood, and mentoring, and being a student. Obedience and rebellion. Heritage and legacy. The light and darkness in all of us. And the spark that sets the world on fire.

This week is Father's Day, too! So spend some time thinking of the men in your life -- fathers, grandfathers, adoptive fathers, mentors, coaches, teachers of all kinds -- who have helped make you who you are today. Give thanks to God for them, and let their imperfect example inspire you to be the best human being you can be.

Our scripture this week is 1 John 2:7-11. Spend some time in prayer with this passage, if you're able. It will help prepare your heart for worship, and will open spiritual doors for the Holy Spirit to enter in. If you're a writing sort of person, you might like to write down how it feels to read it, or what thoughts or questions come up for you as you turn the words over in your mind. And then, come to worship in anticipation of the presence of God!

See you Sunday, friends.

Love and blessings,
Pastor Dawn

Oh and PS. Don't forget our Emmaus gathering tomorrow (Saturday the 15th) at noon in the Fireside Room! Bring a pot luck dish to share if you can, but most of all just bring yourself. We will sing, and pray for the upcoming Walks in Reno, talk about Emmaus-y stuff, and have a great lunch together. Hope to see you there.

AND PPS. Next week's movie is "O Brother, Where Art Thou." It is really strange and wonderful, with an awesome old timey gospel soundtrack. It's PG-13 for comic criminality, and one suggestive scene. It is one of my all time favorite movies. Come see it with us on Wednesday at 6pm at the downtown Fallon Theatre! And feel free to bring friends and neighbors, the more the merrier. Any snacks you buy at the concession stand go to support the Save the Fallon Theatre project, too, so that's a bonus. :-)