Dear Friends,

The field was muddy this morning when I walked my dog. Given the non-winter we have had, I’m wondering what March will bring us. I always think of what Philip Simmons wrote about “mud season.” Simmons was a talented writer, a contributor to the UU World magazine, who died far too young of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“Our town (in New Hampshire) is a rumpled bed of stone scoured clean by glaciers that withdrew only ten thousand years ago….after the melt, life took hold, and eventually trees, but a hundred centuries of death and resurrection have yielded only a meager soil, laid like a thin sponge over that unyielding granite bed. With the March thaw, that sponge sops full: streams gush, swamps rise, bogs flush, forest hollows fill with vernal pools.” “For several weeks, with snow still knee-deep in shadowed woods….we live in a between time, neither winter nor spring. …. It’s a time of neither here nor there, a non-season when, as T. S. Eliot wrote ‘between melting and freezing/the soul’s sap quivers…Mostly, it’s the season of mud.’”

I have been your interim minister for about a year and a half, the mid-point in these three years of interim ministry. So truly, we are in a “between time.” I thank you for your continued patience, engagement, and caring for this community even during a time of change.

Thank you for showing up on Sunday, at Food for Thought, at meditation, for the choir, leading Winter Workshops, on the Generous Giving committee or all of the myriad ways you say, with your time, your presence, your gifts, loud and clear “this community matters to me, and I want to help keep it strong for others who may one day walk through these doors, as I did.”

A little over a year ago, some of us gathered in the Stearns Room on an afternoon in February to share reactions to the YouTube video that Manish had published. On Sunday March 15th at 4 pm, we’ll gather in the Stearns Room; I’d like to hear your thoughts and feelings on where you are at with the video and all the discussions that have arisen from it.

Please drop me a line if you’d like to set up a time to talk, one on one. Email is a good way to reach me to set up (jenny@fplincoln.org).

Lent reminds me of the “pilgrimage” aspect of these journeys we share; I continue to enjoy walking this stretch of the pilgrim road with you.In faith,

Jenny Rankin