Thank you for the warm welcome! I appreciate how kind everyone is, bearing with me while I learn all the new names and faces, which I may have to relearn when the masks come off. 

Last week, Jane Anne compared the barrage of new information to drinking from a fire hose. And let me tell you, that is exactly how I am feeling. My head is so overstuffed with new information, it hurts – almost like I just took several pounds of water straight to the face. I am a little overwhelmed. Most of the week was full of “someone pinch me, I must be dreaming” moments as I celebrated this new and exciting community. However, the self-doubt gremlin would often creep in, and anxiety would overwhelm my excitement. 

Then came Sunday, and out of the fire hose came an overwhelming outpouring of Love. I felt the Love of God through every welcome, every prayer, every song, every child, every student, and every person. It was a wonderful reminder that even though we may not know each other yet, God knows us all and will still lead us to Love. For some time now, God has been working on me and preparing me for Plymouth. I am so excited to be here, even if I am a little overwhelmed. When that little gremlin starts running its mouth again, I’m just going to blast it with the firehose of Love. 

Wish me luck. 

​“No experience exists apart from the story we tell about it.”
​Gareth Higgins, Ring Lake Ranch, 9/6/21

​Last week Hal and I had the privilege to be with author, storyteller, and peacemaker, Gareth Higgins at Ring Lake Ranch, just south of Dubois, WY. Gareth is a native of Northern Ireland and grew up in Belfast during “the Troubles” of the 1980’s and 1990’s before the Peace Accord. By his own admission, he grew up with fear in an evangelical Protestant household that had family ties to Catholic relatives. And he was coming into to the realization that he was gay. He grew up with stories about life that engendered fear as well as with the threat of real danger. Throughout his young adulthood he worked in peacemaking efforts in Ireland and around the world. He became one of the founders of the progressive and post-evangelical Christian Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina where he completed a PhD in sociology and met his husband, Brian Ammons, an Alliance of Baptists (very progressive Baptists) pastor and an educator with his own PhD in education. This is part of the “outside” story of Gareth. We were privileged to learn some of Gareth’s and Brian’s “inside” story – that they are some of the warmest and most welcoming people you could ever meet, funny and full of joy, deep, compassionate listeners, incredible partners in the ministries that each of them has in the world, wise beyond their middle years, and both of them forces for peacemaking, violence reduction, the power of dreams and connection with the earth. 

Last week was a week of great beauty in the wilderness of the Wind River Range of Wyoming where Ring Lake Ranch is situated in a beautiful valley with three lakes for fishing, many hiking trails and a stable full of horses for riding. I hope you can go there at some point to connect with the earth and to be part of the wonderful conference learning. However, my experience of the Ranch last week was not just centered around Gareth and Brian or the beauty of the setting. My experience was the delight of sinking into a “tribe” of creative people from all over the country eager to ask questions about deepening their faith, passionate about peacemaking in small and big ways in our fractious world, brimming with joy in their experiences of wilderness, and willing to share with vulnerability their personal fears and their fears in this time of pandemic, political division and climate crisis. We learned and laughed and cried and did dishes after each meal together, creating community from a group of people that had never met and would never be in same place together again, community that was precious and taught me about the kin-dom of God’s beloved community. 

This week I return to work as one of your pastors and to the community of Plymouth. I bring a more rested mind, a more centered heart, and a desire to share with you the story that as fearful as things might be, we, too, can be vulnerable with one another as we create beloved community here in Fort Collins. The pandemic is not over. We are having to pivot daily it seems to create protocols and programming that creatively meets the challenges of keeping folks safe. We are ALL tired and frayed with the stress of this pandemic story we are living, tired of wearing masks that hide our expressive faces, tired of not meeting together in the ways in which we have always been accustomed. We are ALL a bit grumpy and anxious, some more than others – even your pastors! Our patience is waning. We have had a lot of staff change in the midst of one of the hardest years our culture and society has had to endure. And as a community we are facing having to embrace a tragedy in one of our families that most of us have never been confronted by, the incarceration of one of our youth for a violent crime. We are all shaken, unsettled, heartbroken in some way, and perhaps, feel alienated from our community even as we long for its sustenance and nurture. 

We all feel the fearful loss of control over our lives in large or small ways. And that creates fear inside of us and among us. Fear is uncomfortable, to say the least. Yet, what if we tell a new story about our fears? 

• What if we let fear unite us instead of divide us, realizing no one thing or person is to blame for the fear of our times? 
• What if we talk honestly and kindly about our fears instead of being grumpy as we try to hide them? 
• What if we choose to embrace the story that “talking with our opponents,” those we disagree with in our Plymouth community, “is less lethal and more effective in establishing peaceable arrangements than the use of force”* – even if the “force” is not physical violence, but is passive aggressive talk or triangulation instead of direct address? 
• What if we remember that words create our worlds and so “violent” words never redeem anything? 
• What if we choose to speak to one another and not about one another? 
• What if we act out of the vulnerability of trust with one another, even in disagreement, knowing that trust leads to the unity of love? 
• How will our community grow in love that can ripple out into the world even in these very trying times if we tell the story of being vulnerable to one another, rather than fractious with one another? 

​
A wise and youngish man who continually faces his own fears and who has learned to tell the story of his fears through the lens of love said to Hal and I and the gathered community at Ring Lake Ranch last week, “No experience exists apart from the story we tell about it.”  My dear Plymouth, how will we tell, and by telling, create our story of beloved community in these trying, exhausting, yet full of possibility, times? 

With you on the journey,

PS! Join the Adult Forum team the next two Sundays, 9/19 and 26, as they explore with us themes from Gareth Higgins’ book How Not to Be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live when Everything Seems Terrifying! And look for news about possible book study groups of this group coming later in the fall. 

*Gareth Higgins, How Not to Be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live when Everything Seems Terrifying, (Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis, MN: 2021, 33).

Image: J.A. Ferguson