Dear Beloved Community,
As I’m writing to you today, I’m flanked with the dearest of friends around me. It’s time for my annual peer learning group retreat with fellow CBF pastors that we affectionately call “preacher camp.” You know the stories of these beloveds of mine – they show up in my sermons, pop up on my social media feeds, inform my leadership, soften and strengthen my living. The six of us serve as pastors all across South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, and for as long as I’ve been your pastor, we have gathered at least once a year to plan sermons, to discuss everything from buildings to budgets to baptisms, to strategize and imagine and mourn and hope for the life of the world. Thank you, dear church, for understanding why this time is essential for me, and generously extending it!
But beyond what we pastors do together is the companionship we share. They’re some of the most important people in my life, and it was from an old Baptist pastor we love – Carlyle Marney – that we adopted our moniker: “friends of the long road.”
Our long road of friendship has been seasoned with all that long roads hold: loss and love and laughter, change around us and within us, pruning and planting and newly-borne fruit we never had imagined. Not too different, of course, from the long road of faith that we in beloved community walk together along Jesus’ Way.
The road of our discipleship will soon lead us to Lent’s beginning. Our time of worship on Ash Wednesday (March 5) will, as it always does, orient us to the spare stretch of the road. For these forty days preceding Easter, we’ll prepare by recalling Jesus’ tenure in the wilderness: where comforts have been cleared away to make room for a deeper, broader experience of God. “Clear Away” will be the theme to guide our Lenten journey, and in worship and study over the weeks ahead, we’ll declutter our hearts to make room for the Spirit to flow within.
I hope you’ll make your plans now to be present for our Ash Wednesday worship, to receive the imposition of ashes and consider again the truth of our finality and fragility: that ‘from dust we came, and to the dust we shall return.’ For when the long road winds and turns, it is the love of God that reconciles us to God, to one another, and to ourselves that steadies us along the way. For 40 days, at least. And then, of course, perhaps for a lifetime. For this love is a love which rests in the very dust of which we were formed, carries us through the living of these days, and returns to God at the end of this life. It sticks and stays, far longer than these ashes will on our brow.
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily