Dear Friends,
For Earth Month, April, 2021 we will be featuring “Love Letters to the Earth” during our April 25 online Sunday celebration service. Would you consider writing a Love Letter?
Guidelines: Love Letters to the Earth should be a concrete and specific as possible. 150-200 words. Probably best to focus on one love subject rather than a love catalogue. For example, rather than writing a love letter to all birds everywhere, choose a specific bird—from your memory, from your front yard or from your imagination. Or you might even focus your love letter on a single feather that floated down gracefully one day as a bird flew overhead—a heavenly handkerchief from a flirtatious dove! We’d like the love letters to be visual/sensory, full of details that spark our imagination and activate our senses. Again, 150-200 words. Please record yourself sharing your love letter on your phone, landscape rather than portrait, and text your video to jeff@dayspringumc.org by April 14th (if you need assistance sending your file, please reach out to Andrea: andrea@dayspringumc.org).
Here’s an example, my own Love Letter to the Earth:
One of my fondest childhood memories was hiking into Havasupai with my father and his scout troop. I was seven years old. My dad carried my sleeping bag and everything else I would need. I carried but one thing: a half-gallon tin can looped with a rope handle. Perhaps a few river-polished stones or a disgruntled toad—I don’t remember exactly what I collected and carried in the can. But that childhood memory has come to symbolize for me an unquenchable curiosity, a desire to understand our world of wonders. A couple of years ago, I was able to return to Havasupai with my own family. Descending into the canyon, getting up close and personal with the layers of sedimentary rock–literally going back through time, millions of years. With age comes beauty! And the magnificence of those falls, their crystal waters painted turquoise by the limestone underneath.
Emily Dickenson once remarked, “’Consider the lilies of the field,’ is one commandment I’ve never broken.” Cultivating a deeper sense of awareness and awe has become for me the heart of prayer and spirituality. With Jesus and Emily, may we consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and the falls and canyons of our Creator. And respond with gratitude and care.
Blessings,
Pastor Jeff