Newsletter April 2019

Dear Church of the Mountain Family,

It’s here.  Well, almost.  Spring, that time of renewal, of burgeoning life, when the silence of winter is pierced aloud by the songs of robins, sparrows, and songbirds. When the first shoots of daffodils, skunk cabbage, and pitcher plants emerge from the hard ground.  When all that is brown sheds its winter coat and bursts forth in living color.

A friend of mine, Kurt Oelschlager,  wrote a poem called “Mud Time,” in which he says in one of the verses:

mud dries,

the earth heals, and,

with the arrival of spring, 

rooted in the mud,

the grass turns green,

roadside weeds and shrubs come alive,

trees leaf out,

nature takes it course.

He’s right—“spring is rooted in the mud.” It has been a difficult winter for the congregation with a number of our members suffering cancer and other health issues. We’ve had our share of mud—the kind that sticks to you, that makes you slip and fall sometimes, that makes you wonder if spring will ever come.

But this is also the season of the renewal of our faith as we come to Holy Week and to the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We will rejoice in, celebrate, and dance over, that which arrives in mud, in dark-damp caves; we will sing over the stone that was rolled aside to release the body that defeated death. 

This is the eternal season that resides in us who have come to believe, who have experienced the resurrection, and who stand as witnesses to the risen Christ.  We know He lives because He lives in us.

Paul wrote: “…that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3:10-11 (NKJV)

Now that we are born of the spirit, love and truth burns in our hearts and sets our lives aflame with the passion for knowing Christ and for making Christ known.

So as we wait for the mud to give way to gardens, as we wait for the earth to heal itself from a long, deep winter, may the Son warm our days, set our lives ablaze with passion for the life given to us so that we would bring this message out into the world:  “He is Risen…. He is Risen Indeed.”

We glory in Christ alone, and we enjoy his presence forever. Amen.

In His Service,

Pastor Sherry