Looking back, moving forward

Holy moley, it has been a while!

I am so grateful to be back with you all after taking a few months to spend with my newborn baby. Life is full of wonderful adjustments, and having supportive community means the world! If I have learned nothing else this year, I have certainly learned to Ask For Help. I simply couldn’t live through all that has happened in the last several months without a loving family, friends and church family, so thank you for allowing me to lean on you.

https://vimeo.com/holmeswood

I came across a video from two years ago, Lent 2021. Then I did a deeper dive on Vimeo, the video service we use to stream Worship at church, and I saw Advent 2020 videos. WOW, that was a wild time. So much was unknown, scary, really difficult. Yet we could see that we were not alone as a collective world and community trying to figure things out. There were certainly lonely moments, absolutely. There were times when we weren’t sure what to do or how to do it, but we managed and figured it out. And there were many “opportunities” (let’s call it that) to trust God and each other to hope we would be able to move to a new space, without COVID making the top of our commonly used words and without it being front of mind every day.

Seeing those Worship videos from that time when we could not be together made me SO proud of all of us for trying really hard to encourage, stay focused, and stay brave during those days. And I felt waves of gratitude for the collective efforts of so many to help each other out, to ask for help, and to be Christ’s (hand sanitized) hands and feet in that time. I hope you’ll take a few minutes this week and think about that season, say 2020 and 2021. What are you proud of? What are you grateful for? Take a big breath and exhale slowly, releasing yourself of the stress of that time. We have moved into a new era, and I thank God for all that we’ve learned.

What is coming up? Spring! Summer! So much!