It’s long past midnight and the baby has been born. As I settle into Christmas Day during the quiet of the night, I am watching it snow outside my living room window. I know. A white Christmas has nothing to do with welcoming the Christ child. But for this southern girl, I can only remember one other white Christmas in my adult life. It’s special. We sing about it and long for it (in the south) knowing every year it’s a long shot.

Feeling the exhaustion of one of the most important seasons of the church (even during COVID) brings a “good” kind of tired with it. And before the time with family and presents and food and naps can begin, I always have to transition from the theological and physical work of the church to a place of rest. It’s interesting to me in a year that has delivered blow after blow and during a season of my ministry that has been personally draining, this happens. A small little thing that causes me to stay up late, sit in the peace and quiet of the parsonage, listening to all of the strange creaks and moans that the house makes trying to keep us warm in this bitter cold snap, while I watch it snow.

And in that moment, I think of Mary. After all is said and done, the excitement of the moment has transpired, the animals have settled back down, Joseph is taking a cat nap, and even baby Jesus is resting contently in her arms, I imagine her sitting there in the quiet. Listening to the sounds of the barn, unfamiliar to her, but maybe the sound of sleeping animals is comforting. A sense of not being alone. The peace and quiet that is probably balm to her weary spirit settles upon her. No more shepherds or angels or curious residents at the inn. Just Mary, her family and her prayers, maybe the sound of some snoring animals and some extra special light from the bright star in the sky. I imagine she was doing some more “pondering in her heart” the events of the past few hours and months.

As I ponder a few things in my heart, I am filled with a deep sense of peace. This is much appreciated because the roller coaster that has been 2020 has not seen much peace, or it has been fleeting at best. I pray for each of you a little bit of time this day to pause and absorb the full scope and meaning of the birth we celebrate. That even if there is no snow wherever you are reading this from, there is some peace and quiet so you can hear the still quiet whisper from God that is trying to remind you that it’s all for you. This incarnation, this in-breaking of God into this chaotic world- is all for you. And that God longs to bring you a sense of peace to calm your fears and restore your spirit this Christmas.

Merry Christmas my friends. May the peace and quiet of a blanket of snow find you this day.

Lory Beth

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.

No dressing up in your best jeans and hiking shirt or your suit or dress and rushing the family out the door on Sunday mornings.No catching up with your friends over coffee or breakfast snacks.No sitting in the pew and staring at the stained glass windows as folks gather for worship.No hugging and shaking hands with church family you haven’t seen in a couple of weeks.No lifting up with one voice the Lord’s Prayer or singing together our favorite songs. No laughing out loud together at the preacher’s joke. No gathering in the familiar Sunday School classroom planning your next service project or studying the Sunday School lesson together. No sharing a large church wide meal together following church or on a Sunday night.No collecting, sorting and selling a bazillion used items at our Fall Bazaar to raise money for our church or for missions.

No doubt, church as we have experienced it has been disrupted in almost every way because of COVID-19.While the church has not for a minute ceased to be the Church, some people question if what we have been doing livestream or via Zoom can even be called Church.Others admittedly have found “pajama church” comforting and easily accessible.Others miss deeply connecting with their church family.

“Make no mistake about it, nothing can stop God from sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with the world.”

I wonder if there are any lessons, we can learn from what is happening right now.Certainly, this is not the first time the Church has had to adapt to its circumstances.When we look at the early Church, we can see some similarities between their context and ours today.When you think about it, it’s amazing that the Church even survived 2000 years.It not only survived but it spread all the way around the world.Make no mistake about it, nothing can stop God from sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with the world.Except maybe you and me if we don’t engage and participate in what the Holy Spirit is doing.

That is why we are going to start a new sermon series at Boone UMC called Reimagining Church:Lessons from the Early Church.We think that we can gain some insight into our current circumstances by looking at how the Church functioned in those first 100 years after Jesus’ ascension.The Church looks so different now from what it did then.But what if there are some characteristics of what God intended Church to be then that we could apply to Church today?

The Early Church had to adapt from early on.The Temple was destroyed in 70 AD and worship as the Judeo-Christians knew it was altered forever.Not every community had a Synagogue and most of those communities rejected the Christian movement so those first Christians had to gather in the safest place they had access to worship- their homes.Sound familiar?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past two months.Knowing that we will not be able to gather and worship for a while in order to keep our community healthy and safe, what if we found another way to get together.What if we plotted our membership and we began to gather in 2 or 3 family units to watch worship together on someone’s back deck and then talked about the message for a few minutes afterwards?What if we found out who the 6 to 7 closest church members were to us and promised to check on them to make sure everyone had what they needed right now?What if we found ways to get together to study Scripture or pray for one another in those neighborhood groups?It might be a beautiful way to connect with some of our church family until we are able to gather with the rest of our church family.

We are also ready to share that after Labor Day and in anticipation of cooler weather making our outdoor gatherings a little tricky, we will start opening up our church building for small groups to gather inside.Those groups are limited to 10 people in a room until CDC and state recommendations change.We have plenty of rooms available and we will be happy to work with our church groups to find an appropriate space for your group to space out and safely distance.

We will look for other ways we can apply what we are learning from our exploration of the Early Church over these next 10 weeks.Our hope is that we can look with fresh eyes and Reimagine what Church can look like today.Don’t miss what God might be doing because you are looking over your shoulder at what Church was a few months ago.Don’t miss what God might be doing because you have certain expectations of what you think Church should be when God is trying to show us what God envisions now.Let’s look ahead with anticipation and excitement to see what this new era of being Church might look like.And it just might be that one path to the future starts by looking back at the Early Church.Either way, I’m excited to see how God plans to use the Church now because I still believe the Church is God’s best plan for the World!

Grace and Peace,

Lory Beth

P.S. One way we are being Church during COVID-19 is to offer a Drive Thru Blessing this Sunday from 2-4 in our front parking lot. Instead of hosting our Backyard Bash we do want to offer a blessing to students, parents, teachers, administrators, and anyone who wants to receive a blessing. Come to the church and drive thru for a blessing and greeting from one of our pastors and staff. We also have stickers for any school age kids!