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Dear friends,
A friend sent me back to an old Dave Matthews Band song this week, “Funny the Way It Is.” It sets life’s extremes side by side: children tumbling through the grass on a bright afternoon while, a few streets over, a fire engine wails toward someone’s worst day. Underneath runs one of life’s great mysteries: how can one world hold all of this at once?
Covenant carried a great deal this week. Four couples were joined in marriage last weekend, and another couple renewed their vows: love declared with lavish, almost absurd abandon. Babies arrived. Most afternoons, I stole a few minutes at my office window to watch children at our day school careen down the playground slide, easily the most delightful perk of this calling that no one warned me about.
There were tears, too: surgeries, hospital rooms, and losses that left empty places among us. In this season of transition, there have also been hard conversations, uncertainty about what comes next, grief over what is changing, and, for some, real anger. Anger can be part of grief, especially when something we love is shifting beneath us. None of it places us outside God’s care. Kate Bowler has a gift for finding honest words for days like these, “beautiful and terrible” all at once.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve come to treasure the muscle memory of our Reformed worship. Week after week, in corporate prayer, we bring our deepest concerns and heartbreak alongside our praise and rejoicing, trusting that God holds each with equal tenderness. The church is built for both. We come with our whole lives, learning to worship, disagree, grieve, celebrate, and serve God together, even when the work is hard.
Maybe that’s why Psalm 121 caught me the way it did. It begins with someone looking out and up: I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come? Alongside it, Matthew tells of Jesus on a mountain, where crowds bring the lame, the blind, the mute, and many others, laying them at his feet. As we lift our eyes, I wonder about the ways God might still surprise us!
At 8:45, I’ll preach in the Chapel; at 9:30, the Rev. Dr. Agnes Norfleet preaches in the Sanctuary while Rev. Isaac Villegas joins us in the Fellowship Hall for our An Ethic of Embrace: Faithful Responses to Immigration speaker series; and at 11:00, she preaches again in the Sanctuary as our joyful Family Worship gathers in the Fellowship Hall.
The song ends with an image of standing on a bridge, watching the water pass beneath us. The bridge changes our view, but the water keeps moving, and the world stretches far beyond what we can see. None of this makes what we feel any less real; it reminds us that our view is not the whole story, and we do not carry it alone. May worship this Sunday help us lift our eyes and remember the breadth of the world God holds.
Come, and bring a friend, wherever this week finds you: in celebration, in sorrow, or somewhere in the long middle.
Grace and peace,
Courtney
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