Dear friends,
Welcome back to church! I missed church life during the summer, even though I worked in my quiet office some of the time and attended several summer services. There’s a magic on Sunday mornings that just doesn’t happen any other place or time and I’m glad to be back in it.
My summer was pretty quiet. I attended my nephew’s wedding in Maine and went to Ferry Beach RE week, and ended it with a quick trip up to New Hampshire/Vermont to celebrate my dear friend and colleague’s retirement from RE work. But other than that I spent most of my days reading, writing, working on the church year, knitting, walking my dog, and playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Go Ravenclaw! J
This past Sunday we welcomed our teachers with our annual fall Teacher Breakfast, where we collect paperwork and get everyone organized into teams. Twenty-five teachers and RE Committee members attended – and many of their children, too. And we started the church school year strong with 28 children and youth in RE classes. I want to thank RE Committee members Rachel Jones, Roma Jerome, Sachié Karmacharya, Louise Harrison Lepera, Sarah McSweeney Chamberlain, Kyle Morton, Elisabeth Strekalovsky, and Lydia Vagts for working to make the breakfast happen.
I also want to thank a few people for making magic happen over the summer. The Building & Grounds committee has been working hard to get our Youth Room back into working order. Thanks to all of them, the room no longer smells funny, and has been painted and has a new indoor-outdoor carpet. Beth and Izzy Tappan-deFrees donated a new futon mattress so we could discard the old, stinky one that was on the couch in there. Izzy also refinished the table we’ve used as an altar piece… please don’t go look at it because it’s so beautiful now I’m worried someone will decide it needs to be someplace other than the youth room!
Will Twombly, in addition to building the beautiful frame on which we hung our index cards after our Water Service (on five days notice!!! We’re all so blessed to have such a Woodworking Wizard here!) also helped significantly with putting all the stuff back into the youth room so we’d have a stuff-free social hall. Ross Dickson found us some shelves to use. Missy and Bob Shay also helped put things back. I’m extremely grateful to all the people who helped make our youth room ready for our youth!
We are still looking for a Youth Coordinator, which is a paid position, 12 hours/week, who helps with Sunday mornings, leads youth group along with our three volunteer advisors, and will help with our OWL programs this year. If you know someone (age 25 or older who has no children currently in our Youth Group) who might like this opportunity, please ask them to contact me!
I look forward to seeing you all on Sunday, when our preschool-kindergarten class will be wandering our halls looking for treasure on a church scavenger hunt, and the middle grade kids will be knitting and doing woodwork. We’ll all be building classroom covenants – our Expectations of one another in church school! And creating ways to welcome newcomers – our Invitation to all to join us in worship and fun!
See you all soon!
In faith,
Lauren
