February 2026
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Dear Church Family,
What an interesting winter it has been - little to no snow can be nice for winter travel, but it makes one wonder about the fire season this summer. If I wasn’t married to a hydrologist (and wasn’t around some of you who are more agriculturally minded), I’m not sure I would think about the impact of a low snow season on our summer season. It makes me wonder how often we miss the connection between what happens now and the ripple effects later on? And on top of that - the mixture of what happens to us and our participation in it. There are things right in front of us that feel urgent and take priority, and only later do we begin to understand the long term impact of what occurred months prior. Perhaps this makes more sense around things like pollution, diet, exercise, but what about our Spiritual lives?
I watched an interview with Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of the book ‘Mattering,’ in which she explores the reality of how what we value impacts our own well-being. What we value is exposed in how we use our time and our energy. She talks particularly about the balance between extrinsic values (getting the house, the car, the job, our popularity, etc) and intrinsic values (wanting to grow spiritually, be a good neighbor, deepen as a person, contribute to improving society, etc). Often pursuing the things we think we need (extrinsic things that are achieved with our money) competes with what actually improves our lives (intrinsic value building - connection, service, generosity, contemplation with God, etc). We need our culture to be more grounded in what really matters, and it starts with each of us.
This Lent I’m going to invite us to practices that deepen our time around those intrinsic values. I’ll be using the book ‘A Different Kind of Fast’ by Christine Valters Paintner, a book that engages the traditional idea of fasting yet curates it around issues of multitasking, anxiety, rushing, holding it all together, planning and certainty. She invites us to instead embrace presence, abundance, slowness, tenderness, unfolding, and mystery. She writes, “we live in a culture that depends on distracting us from our true hungers, because when we identify with these surface hungers we will consume more and more in the search for satisfaction, which often fuels our anxiety over the world or our sense of the inadequacy of our lives. What is nourishing are the things that are life-giving, joy-bringing, peace-arising, purpose-revealing. I want to invite you into a different kind of fast, one that helps you identify those patterns and habits that distract you from the fullness of life and open up space for the feast that awaits each of us.” (from the introduction, a little rearranged for this newsletter).
I hope you’ll consider joining us - either on Sundays in worship and with soup lunches and conversation, or perhaps you’ll pick up the book and explore these ideas and practices in tandem. My prayer is for each of us to draw closer to the heart of God - so that we might know ourselves as our Creator sees us, finding our grounding in our sacred belonging, a living God’s love out loud to our world in ways that draw each human heart closer to him.
Blessings for the journey, Pastor Becca
