Happy Saturday, friends. I hope that you have a chance to enjoy the spectacular show God is putting on for us this Fall with the leaves this year. I wanted to update you on what is happening with worship at Boone UMC over the next couple of months. This is based on a recent Health and Safety Team meeting, as well as Worship Committee meeting.Happy Saturday, friends. I hope that you have a chance to enjoy the spectacular show God is putting on for us this Fall with the leaves this year. I wanted to update you on what is happening with worship at Boone UMC over the next couple of months. This is based on a recent Health and Safety Team meeting, as well as Worship Committee meeting.As everyone is aware, our Boone community has experienced an alarming uptick in COVID positive cases the past 3-4 weeks. After watching the community numbers and receiving a notice from the Health Department asking churches to help mitigate the community spread because they are starting to see some clusters in churches in our community, the Health and Safety Team decided now is not the time to start indoor in-person worship. We will continue to offer two livestream worship services (9:00 alternating Traditional and Praise and Worship and 11:00 Crossroads) each Sunday morning until those numbers decrease. Here are the metrics we will be looking for in order to reconsider opening up for indoor worship.1. 7-day percent positive average <5% in Watauga County for at least 14 days2. Daily new cases rate for Watauga County less than 25 per 100,000 (orange level) for at least 14 days.Here is a website that you can visit to find both of these metrics and much more. Once we hit these benchmarks, we can consider opening up for limited number indoor worship.

High Country COVID19 Stats

OUTDOOR WORSHIP
In the meantime, we are going to offer a Sunday morning outdoor worship opportunity, weather permitting. Worship Committee has worked hard to discern in-person worship opportunities, and following are details for our next fall season offering:

October 25 at 11:00 AM, we will offer an outdoor worship experience at the Portico entrance (where we have been doing all of our outdoor services on the left side of the property). We will still livestream the Sanctuary service at 9:00 am, and the Crossroads service at 11:00am. The Outdoor Service: Grace – Amazing, will feature simple unplugged music and prayer. Join others from your church family for this worshipful Sunday morning service. You can stay in your car or bring a chair or blanket and sit socially distanced in the grass. Masks are required until you are settled in your space, and then they can be removed. Singing is allowed because of the outdoor setting.

WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS CHRISTMAS?
In anticipation of Christmas Eve, which is one of the most beautiful nights of worship our church hosts all year long, we are making plans. Even if we were to reach the above mentioned benchmarks, we have decided to plan on not hosting an in-person Christmas Eve service. There are a couple of reasons for this decision. Our Christmas Eve services tend to draw large numbers of people, often from outside the High Country, during a time when family gatherings occur with greater frequency. In-person Christmas Eve services present many risks during a pandemic. We want to create worship opportunities that are both meaningful and safe throughout the year and during the holiday season. We believe we can offer something special for Christmas Eve and minimize everyone’s risk.

On Christmas Eve, we will provide a livestream recorded worship service that will be amazing! Then you and your family can choose when during your busy Christmas Eve festivities you want to sit down and worship together.
We will also provide a creative and unique experience on Christmas Eve for those who really want to have a moment in the church. I am calling it “I Wonder as I Wander” [but it might change names before December 24!]. Participants will be able to sign up for staggered entry times, and we will invite you to wander from the FLC to the Sanctuary to outside visiting “no touch” reflection stations as you wonder about what that first Christmas Eve was like. You will be able to walk through the Sanctuary and receive “walk-in” Communion (administered safely) and a blessing from one of our pastors. We will lead you outside for caroling of Silent Night and Joy to the World (one of my favorite parts of the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service!). Movement will flow continuously through the building with everyone masked in order to create a safe experience. More details are to come. Also, if you would like to help out on Christmas Eve as a host, greeter, or musician, please let me know. Maybe your plans have been disrupted and your family is not gathering like you usually do. We would love to have your help.
Finally, we are also dreaming up one other special, festive Advent worship experience that will involve outdoor caroling and some kind of outdoor display or nativity with music and bring-your-own-hot chocolate.
Please be in prayer for our community as we head into the cooler months. We are continuing to plan for opportunities for you to worship and connect. We have heard how badly many of you want to worship God with one another. We have also heard that some of you, as badly as you want to worship with others, will probably not be present physically until a vaccine is widely dispersed. We will continue, as a staff, to honor both of those needs and everything in- between, as best we can. We pray there are some things in this email that bring you hope and joy as we approach the holiday season.

While I have your attention – here are two more things coming up that you won’t want to miss.

October Drive Thru Blessing and Candy Give Away – Saturday, October 31, from 4-6 PM, our church is hosting a drive thru candy give away and blessing. Decorate your cars and decorate yourselves and drive through for candy and a candle. We will be giving out candles to use the next morning for our All Saints Service where we remember our loved ones who have passed away in the past year. If you want to dress up and give out candy, please let me know. The more the merrier and plenty of room to create multiple candy stations!

November 3- Election Day Prayer Gathering – On an important day in the life of our country that brings with it a lot of anticipation and stress, we will offer a 15 minute outdoor prayer service at noon at the Portico entrance on the left side of our property. We will also offer prayer for our honored veterans during this special gathering.

November Drive Thru Blessing – Finally, on Sunday, November 22, we will offer a Drive-Thru Blessing. This will be an important opportunity for you to come and be prayed for and for your family to receive an Advent Box with supplies to help you worship during Advent. If you need an Advent Wreathe so you can light candles during worship, we will provide you with one. Our Children’s Ministry is providing special devotional activities for families with children or grandchildren. We want to share with you some supplies that we will invite you to use throughout Advent and Christmas Eve.

As you can see, there are some fun and important opportunities for you to participate and connect with one another coming up. The Church has never stopped being the Church, even if we have to do it in different ways. Please mark your calendars for these events. I hope to see your beautiful faces for at least one of these opportunities. Know that I hold our church family in my prayers daily.

Grace and Peace,

Lory Beth

It’s taken me three weeks to write this blog. And it is my latest example of living day after day and week after week at our limit.

I am reminded of the story of Esther when she has learned that her people, the Jewish people, are in big trouble. They are a breath or two away from being destroyed by genocide. She is the queen but she is limited. Her cousin has just told her the plans that have been made to destroy the Jews and here is Esther’s frustrated response:

10 In reply Esther ordered Hathach to tell Mordecai: 11 “All the king’s officials and the people in his provinces know that there’s a single law in a case like this. Any man or woman who comes to the king in the inner courtyard without being called is to be put to death. Only the person to whom the king holds out the gold scepter may live. In my case, I haven’t been called to come to the king for the past thirty days.” – Esther 4:9-11

Esther is between a rock and a hard place. She needs to do something to save her people but accessing the king is easier said than done. She could be killed for simply calling on the King uninvited. She is between a rock and a hard place. Nothing is easy for her.

However in her situation – it is for a moment in time. She figures out a solution and then acts. I feel like Esther except It’s not just one problem to solve, it’s twenty. And it feels like it comes in waves. It’s like Groundhog Day meets Esther.

Things that used to be easy for me are not anymore. Everything takes more and more effort. Things I used to enjoy doing require my best self-pep talk to get started. Those of you who know me know this is not typically how I roll. And I’ve been feeling this way for about two months now. Maybe you have had the same thing happen to you. For myself, I navigated the first several months of the COVID Disruption thriving on the stress of it all, problem solving, exploring new ways of doing things. It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t completely draining. And then it was like I hit a wall and everything changed. A colleague shared an article with me a few weeks ago and the light bulb went off. The title of the article is “Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted -It’s Why You Feel Awful” by Tara Haelle.

This article explains what I think many of us have been experiencing. Early on we were using “surge capacity” to operate as we navigated our new reality. Surge capacity is how our body naturally responds mentally and physically in short term stressful situations, like natural disasters. Having a well-adapted surge capacity is critical for our survival. The problem is, this is designed to function for a short term period, not indefinitely.

A pandemic creates more of a long term problem to survive. And now we must learn both that our surge capacity is only designed for short periods and how to recharge our surge capacity. Over time, our surge capacity starts shorting out. We lose our ability to focus, be motivated, and start wondering if we are falling victim to a round of depression or burnout.

This has been particularly difficult for high achievers who feel lost in the ambiguity of a muddled future, lack of routine, and completely upended systems and processes. It’s kind of hard to solve problems that for the moment, don’t really have solutions yet.

The article talks about the concept of ambiguous loss. Friends, we have experienced so much loss in the last six months that I can’t even begin to start listing them. Every one of us has had multiple losses and the kind of losses that seem indefinite and utterly disruptive. Loss of freedom. Loss of routine. Loss of celebrations. Loss of educating our children at our best. Loss of connection. Loss of finances (unless your resources are mostly in the stock market). And for us, the most painful loss of all is worshipping God in the church building.

I encourage you to read the article to see her suggestions for building back up your surge capacity (click on the title of the article above). They are all different ways of being kind to yourself and managing expectations so that you don’t try and function now like you did 7 months ago.

What I do know is that like Esther, we do have within us the capacity to stop, rest, reset, and then keep going. Esther found a way, a very creative way (if you haven’t read that story in the while I encourage you to find it in the Old Testament and check out her resourcefulness) to get unstuck and to persevere. When she was at her limits, with the help of those closest to her, and some outside of the box thinking, and a lot of prayer and fasting, she found a way.

I figure, I don’t have to save my people from genocide, I just need to finish this blog. I can do it. And I did. Even if it’s two weeks late.

I pray if you are feeling out of sorts that you can find a way to renew your surge capacity. We have a while longer to go in this. Not only be kind to yourself. But be kind to others. Their surge capacity may be on the fritz, too.