I sit in the same place this morning that I sat a year ago: the Tuesday before Easter writing a message that you will read in 3 Crowns the week after Easter. So much will happen between my writing and your reading.
Last year I was so aware of how uncertain the next week would be: we hadn’t celebrated Easter together inside our sanctuary for two years, and we had learned from the arrival of the Omicron variant right before Christmas just how quickly plans could change. Clearly it would be risky to write a message about how wonderful it would be to be together.
I thought that I would sit down this year much more confident that I knew how we would walk the coming week together.
And yet… how much do I really know? I know what my calendar tells me about when I will walk through the doors of Epiphany each day between now and Easter… but do I really know what that journey will look like?
I wonder if the uncertainty of the past few years has taught me something about the powerful presence of that uncertainty… to take each step wondering what will be revealed in the moments to come. The uncertainty is a gift in itself that leaves me open to wonder what will actually happen when we join together and bring our relationships and presence to one another in a journey that is both familiar and new each year.
So I send this off a bit like a message in a bottle… looking forward to encountering each of you as we walk the path together from Palm Sunday to Easter. And you will read it at the other end of that road when we all look back at where that path took us this year.
Nelia Newell
