It’s that time of year. The trees are still beautiful, but the brightest days of autumn are past. The leaves are falling faster than my husband can blow them away. My perennial gardens have all been put to bed for the winter. Fire wood was delivered yesterday. A racoon has taken a big bite out of the pumpkin on my front walk. And my daughter and I are starting to talk about the menu for Thanksgiving. Before we know it, the first beautiful snow will be here, making everything clean and fresh and calling us to the joys of Christmastide. This is a time of turning, a time of giving thanks for the gifts of this year and looking ahead to the year to come. It is a time to sit in front of the fire with seed catalogs and dream of planting again in the spring.
By the time this newsletter is in print, we will have said our good-byes to each other. I have been blessed so deeply by my time with you this fall. I loved getting to know you all. It was a great joy to share the Old Testament stories with you and to string them together in chronological order, the way many of us have not heard them before. Your joyful responses to this approach have given me confidence to do this again in the future.
God is planting seeds in this church right now. You won’t see the plants till they stick their heads up next year, and it will be later still before you can reap a harvest. But the seeds are there, doing their winter work right now.
A time of turning, a time to give thanks. God is good, all the time!
Pastor Cathy Turrentine