Dear friends,
I’m back from both Tahoe retreats — the Youth Group “healthy relationships” weekend, and my final week with the Company of New Pastors, both of which were held at the beautiful Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center. I appreciated the snow and the cold, the sunshine and the rocks and the sight of our young polar bear boys swimming. I loved the cabins and grounds of the center, and had fun adventuring around during my free time. But most of all, I loved the people we were with.
We had a great bunch of people on the YG retreat. Some youth brought friends, and others strengthened their existing friendships. Our beloved adult advisors were terrific – Keith Geckeler, Jim Allardice, Niki Hicks, Anna Santos, Debbie Fallehy, and my seminary friend (and Presbytery colleague) Tad Hopp who made a big splash when he showed up in his “straight outta the closet” T-shirt. The group meshed together well — definitely at least as well as the yarn-web tablecloth we made — and the skits and games we played were like water that dissolved our inhibitions and differences. This week at YG, in our “check-in” when we asked them to name favorite moments, they named “walking with my friends,” “swimming with my friends,” “laughing in the kitchen with my friends.”
There’s something extra significant about our faith-community relationships. These cohorts of people we go through life with – by which I mean our YG advisors, our peers, our new-member classes, and our crew of Jumble Sale collaborators – these relationships are the strings that weave the community together. You know my favorite puzzle about whether it’s possible to be a Christian while shipwrecked alone on a desert island, and no offense meant toward the imaginary denizens of those theoretical lands, but I think we need other people. Our faith is practiced as we serve and help one another, and as we share with and pray for one another. I was privileged to watch those cords of connection being spun in the beauty of Tahoe. These cords hold us together and keep us strong as we try to learn together what it is to love and serve God with our whole lives.
I personally feel a little unmoored, now that I’ve been cut out of the web of Company of New Pastors. Really, all this means is that the denomination will no longer organize our cohort meetings or pay any portion of the costs. But the connections we built aren’t gone, and we will still have a monthly phone call which costs nothing. My group of eight pastors is trying to coordinate so that we all attend another conference together next year, and tack on an extra day. I’m cautiously hopeful that this will work out for us. In a way, the three years we had together were an incubation program, much like the Youth Group program is for our teenagers. At some point you have to graduate, and at some point you’ll need to use your own initiative to create the community that was formerly created for you. May we do all we can do to keep these faith relationships strong for one another at MPC.
Every Blessing,
Talitha