The Pictures I Didn't Take

There's this website called unphotographable. I love it. And there were so many things this weekend that I didn't take a picture of, and so many that I couldn't have even if I had wanted to. Here are a few of them.


This is the picture I did not take of two little old church ladies- happily walking down the hall hand in hand.

This is the picture I did not take of my friend Tyler dancing to Christ Has Broken Down the Wall, across the stage and down the aisle and around the room, dancing so beautifully that I couldn't help but cry.

This is the picture I did not take of the joy on my friend Justin's face as he received his first reconciling stole, one of a beautiful crowd of 700 joyfully bestowing them on one another.

This is the picture I did not take of a family, the mother offering communion to her two little boys, and the five year old offering it to his mother in return.

This is the picture I did not take of my friend Mittie standing up to sign the chorus of We Are Called and watching it spread across the crowd.

This is the picture I did not take of the Reverend Amy DeLong, standing up to do what she was called to do, still a reverend and still a faithful, loving companion to her partner Val.

This is the picture I did not take of a grown man in tears as he told us about the recent affirmation of our LGBT  brothers and sisters by the Presbyterian Church (USA), or of the tears in the eyes of the crowd as he told us that he believed we would be next.

This is the picture I did not take of 50 young adults crammed into a tiny room to make a plan of action because they are committed to a church that is not always committed to them.

This is the picture I did not take of a room full of people dancing unabashedly in joy and hope.

This is the picture I did not take of 700 people, hand in hand, singing and praying for the church to draw the circle of their love wider.


If you were at Sing A New Song and want to share some of the pictures you didn't take, please leave a comment. I'd love to see them.

Expansion!

Well, instead of the blog post I wrote for yesterday, I have for you all a link to that post on the other blog which I will now be contributing to from time to time. Woo!

http://umonfire.blogspot.com/2011/08/raising-dead-waking-sleepers.html

I hope the flood of blog posts these past few days hasn't been too much for everyone. It's almost been like I'm a real, full-time blogger who's dedicated to writing. In any case, I have one more post about SANS that I'll try to get up later today, and then classes start up again tonight so I'll probably be back to my once a week goal. We'll see how it goes.

I hope you've enjoyed the updates about my experience at Sing A New Song, and I hope maybe you've learned something or gotten a new idea. If you want to hear any of the talks that I referenced, you can watch the videos (hopefully they will all be up soon!) on the SANS website.

http://sans2011.org/multimedia/videos/

I'd recommend any of them. All of the speakers had such great things to say!

If you've been reading all weekend, thanks for making this journey with me! And if you've kind of zoned out, well, things will get back to usual this week. Though I am really excited about my last SANS post, so I hope you at least read that one.

Peace!

The Images of God

Because so many people left early this morning, yesterday's services and closing banquet were the last parts of the conference that many people were a part of, which meant that we've already had the "sending out into the world" feeling. Yesterday's words of encouragement were to remind us that each of us bears the image of God.

What was really awesome, though, was extending that to think of ourselves as bearing the many images of God.

We are who we are.
We will be who we will be.
We are the cloud.
We are the fire.
We are the gentle whisper.
We are the voice crying in the night, "awake!"

God is active in the world, and God is active through us- we work it out in our lives, in the church, in the world.

We have the power of God behind us, and we will shake the earth.

Unity, Not Uniformity

I would sum up yesterday’s many wonderful speakers with this: our goal is to seek unity without losing identity.

The day was bookended with affirmations of who we are as Reconciling Methodists and what it is that we hope for in the future. Reverend Amy DeLong spoke in the morning about hypocrisy and bullying in the church. She encouraged all of us there to resist the temptation to deny who we are, who we have been made to be. In the evening Bishop Joseph Sprague outlined his vision for the “new song” that we are singing; we work for safe jobs and living wages, for education and organization, for peace, and for the recognition and equality of all human beings.

Yet sandwiched there in the middle was the reminder from UCC Bishop Yvette Flunder that, just as we claim our identity as the church despite outcry from those who would claim otherwise, we likewise cannot exclude those who disagree with us from the body of Christ. We are all unique organs performing specific functions and all held together by the skin of the love of Christ, to borrow Bishop Flunder’s (and Paul’s) analogy. We are all the church together, yet that does not mean we lose sight of who we were created to be.

We may have our disagreements. They may seem enough to rip the church apart. In the past, they certainly have. But even disagreement over the very nature of God did not stop the biblical authors: we have in the two creation stories two very different representations of God. We have a God who is distant, who creates with words and stands back from it all to observe; on the other hand, we have a God who gets down in the dirt and works with divine hands to create and participate. But what truly matters is that we are given both! The authors might have disagreed about what kind of God they worshiped, but they could still stand together as God’s people.

We are called to unity in the body of Christ, but unity is not the same as uniformity.

Hope

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been in Huron, Ohio, since Tuesday. I’m here for a conference called Sing A New Song- it’s a partnership between the Reconciling Ministries Network and the Methodist Federation for Social Action (where I’ll be interning for the next two years), and it’s basically a chance for United Methodists who care about justice issues ranging from LGBT rights to stewardship of the environment and everywhere in between to get together, encourage one another, and dream about and work toward a better future.

So if I had to choose one word to describe yesterday’s kickoff events, it would be hope. Hope for this weekend. Hope for the future. Hope for the church. Hope for the world.

That was definitely the theme of the young adult forum I got the chance to be a part of for a little while yesterday morning. What gives you hope? What do you hope for in the future of the church? What stories (biblical and non-biblical) give you hope and encouragement as you continue to work for peace and justice?

You know what gives me hope?

We do.

For many people (especially in local congregations!), the first thing that comes to mind when they think of young adults is, “Where are they?” But at this conference, 1 in 7 participants are under 35. And that’s after all of the people who were unable to come because school starts this week. That’s awesome.

The message of last night’s kickoff service was that we are the church, too. We—young adults, LGBT, people of color, the poor, anyone who has ever felt hated by or left out of “the church”—we are the church, too. And we can change it. We can choose to live in a better way because that’s what we are called to. That’s why we are here. That’s why we work—because we believe that the church, the world can be better.

We have hope. And we carry hope out into the world.