Friends, 

We’re in Week 51. 

I can scarcely believe it. 

I wasn’t here when the UCG staff made the call to close the campus and take our life online together, but I was serving as the acting head of staff of our church in Illinois and I remember sitting around the conference table and hashing out the details. Calling the moderator and ordering in lunch from down the street when we realized we needed to send out a letter and stuff 800 envelopes.  I wrote to my congregation about flattening the curve and wondered if we’d be back by Easter. We made a list of short term tasks and longer term items, if this stretched to six, even eight weeks. Several wondered if we should ask the Senior Pastor to come back, but over time, as we watched numbers climb, we realized he’d still get the full pandemic ministry experience if he waited until June to come back. 

When my conversations with UCG grew more frequent and serious over the summer, I wondered if I could really move my family to Florida in the midst of a pandemic. But the UCG response was so responsible, so faithful, that I assured my extended family that we would be okay here. Our safety would be valued. 

It’s a sign of my privilege, I know, that I never considered safety one of my top values. Important, sure, but I usually took it as a given. My understanding of the Gospel lies in “taking risks in love,” and tends to downplay the importance of security and certainty. But the pandemic has shifted my perspective. I find I would do just about anything to avoid the risk of danger to those in my care, even if it means passing Easter and Christmas and all the weeks in between online, if it means learning video editing and the intricacies of Zoom, if it means no live theater or visits with my grandparents.. 

But now? For a moment, at least, the danger is subsiding. Not gone, but lessening. And it feels safe to  envision a gradual return to some in-person gathering. 

We have been changed in this time; lost so much, said good-bye to so many.  Despaired and cried and tried to survive. And now, now… it feels possible to envision the future. 

We’re still in Lent. Still in the midst of the pandemic. But Easter is coming, and there are three vaccines. Watching the azaleas burst into bloom across this city, planning a chance to meet you (masked, from a distance) in person, I hear the words of a biblical poet echo: ‘Arise, my love[s], my fair one[s], and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come.

I cannot wait to sing with you. 

Bromleigh