Dear St. Luke’s,

I am often surprised by what turns out to be easy and what turns out to be difficult. This past year and a half, I feel like the simplest things all of a sudden became a significant challenge. I am personally tired of hearing “unprecedented” in terms of doing Church, and find myself overusing the analogy of swimming through Jell-O for doing things that seemed all too easy just two years ago. If you are wondering, I have never swum through Jell-O before, but I imagine it to be cumbersome if not impossible.

On the other hand, every once and a while I am delightfully surprised when the opposite happens. This past February we were preparing to pass through the unimaginably narrow gate that would allow us to worship indoors again, an initial requirement was to remove all of the books from the sanctuary. After spending literally hours hauling all of the books out of the Church and into the library it became clear that our Books of Common Prayer were not up to specs. Almost all of them had significant damage to the section with Rite II Eucharist, our standard service on Sunday. The books were well loved, but being a solid ten years older than me, they needed to be put out to pasture.

With much fear and trepidation, I began to inform the congregation that our beloved Books of Common Prayer would not return to the Church, and we were hoping to replace them. I honestly thought this was going to be a disaster, but putting broken, dated books back in the pews just felt silly. So, less than two weeks ago, we put out a notice about what we were doing, why we were doing it, and I was thinking that maybe by Easter we would have all of the prayer books that we would need. Now I have the privilege of telling you to please stop sending money for prayer books! We have exactly the amount that we need, and the replacements have already started to trickle into the office. This Sunday we will give thanks for these gifts to the Church, and you will start to see new books back in the pews.

Thank you to those who made this an easy and quick endeavor, and I promise to put them to good use!

Blessings,

Nick