A congregant recently told me she is burnt out at work and in life. When she made a list of everything she loved doing, she saw she wasn’t doing any of the things that nourished her spirit. She made a spring commitment to tend the garden of her own soul.
We are awakening again. Entwined with the natural world, we will rise out of the mud of March and start stretching into the spotty spring of April.
The church itself is awakening, as we return to in-person worship services and religious education, and learn how to be church online and in-person at the same time. We are called to our people at this tender time, to celebrate the beauty of community and revel in the joy of being together, and also to honor the reality of grief and the continued toll the pandemic and its attendants have taken on our souls.
There is a lot of burnout in the world right now, and among many of our members. The pandemic has been especially hard on care-workers and caregivers—health care workers, teachers, therapists, parents, people caregiving for loved ones, childcare providers, service workers and more. Many care-workers and caregivers in our congregation are feeling the smoldering edges of burnout, if not its full tar pit.
Our call as a community now is to attend to the smoldering, the tar pits, the ashes, to nourish our people’s spirits, to help heal what has been broken in the pandemic, and tend delicate new shoots in the gardens of the soul. The good news is that this is what church is for, and we know how to do it.
So come in, and come home, First Church. Be nourished, let your spirits awaken and arise with the spring, let us be healed, and heal one another.
With love,
Rev. Jennifer
Rev. Jennifer Nordstrom, Senior Minister