Someone In Your Life Needs Your Encouragement. TODAY.

“Encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. “  --1 Thessalonians 5:14

“You can do it! I know you can. Just give it your best.”

Sixty-one years old. Almost 33 years into my professional calling. I’ve served churches throughout New England and been a community leader for more than half my life. Yet in spite of all that experience, I still need encouragement some days. Even most days. I need a kind word from a friend. A reassuring “You got this!” from a co-worker. A simple “thank you!” from someone I work for, so I know my efforts are noticed and appreciated.

Encouragement. 

There is something about September and our impending entry into this ninth month that reminds me each year of how important it is to offer encouragement to others, and to confess that we need encouragement too, no matter what our age or station in life. Maybe it is because this is the time when students go back to the classroom and having moved up one more year or maybe into a new school, this can bring on worry and even fear. You know…new teacher. New friends. New classes. Add the ongoing fallout from almost three years of COVID and who knows how the school year will go?! So, what better gift to give a kid or young adult in our lives than the gift of support, letting them know we care about them, and we believe in them and that they are going to do great!

There’s a wonderful and true story about a dad from Louisiana who each morning, for eight years now, has written and then put a short note of encouragement, into his daughter’s brown bag lunch.  He’s penned more than 700 notes and counting! The first was penned eight years ago for her first day in the 4^th grade. "Be nice to others. Not everyone will look like you. Learn to spot the unique and special things in other people. You have the power to change someone's life." And every school day since then each morning brings a new message of hope for his beloved daughter.  How cool would it be for more of us to commit to doing such a simple yet profound act of love for our children, really anyone we love and want to see do well in this life. I know I’d be thrilled to find such notes in my briefcase on a Monday morning! You would to.

Because we all need extra courage some days. It’s not rocket science or complicated psychology.  To encourage simply means to give courage to another.  And that word “courage”, from the French coeur, means “heart” so when we encourage, we literally give heart, give from our hearts to enlarge, and strengthen the heart of another. Imagine how much kinder and more merciful this world might be if more and more of us each day found at least one person to encourage and to build up.

A few years back I struggled with chronic pain in my neck that for some time, doctors just could not solve nor cure.  It was a very dark time. Discouraging. And so, my best friend made a promise to me. She’d call me or I would call her, every single day. We’d check in and she’d help get me through to the other side of my health struggles, and she did. Day by day and month by month. All by encouraging me to be strong and to trust that “this too shall pass.” That she was with me. That she wasn’t going anywhere. And that God was with me too. (Thanks Barb!)

It amazes me how much just one loving word, a single phone call, a quick text, or a thank you note in the mail, can make my soul soar.  Can make someone else’s day. Can remind a person that they are so much more than they might be feeling, especially in a down moment.  Encouragement is like oxygen for the human spirit. Without it, our soul wither and shrink. With encouragement, we can do anything and have faith and trust that we have folks in our corner, cheering us on.

Here's some spiritual homework. When you need some encouragement, begin on that path by spending intentional time with folks that you love and who love you right back too. Let them know if things are tough and that you may need a kind word or an “atta boy!” or “Nice job!” It is only human. EVERYONE needs encouragement and courage, especially for the living of these days, these intense and wild and sometimes very hard days of 2022.

Then look in your life for people who need encouragement from you, right now. Your child or grandchild. Your spouse or partner. Someone who works for you. A homebound neighbor. Heck, how about the gracious woman who serves you coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts in the drive-thru every morning?  They all need to know that you are in their court and on their side and pulling for them. GO! GO!

Who will you encourage this day?  Go forth. Give your heart to another. Make God’s world a more courageous place.

YOU CAN DO IT!!!!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

      

              

 

Packing for a Trip? Include Curiosity. Leave Behind Judgment.

“Be curious, not judgmental.”                       --Walt Whitman

$4.71 for a gallon of gas in South Hollan, Illinois. $3.71 in Owatonna, Minnesota.  $4.43 in Corning New York.  For 128 ounces of gas in Amherst, Ohio, it was $3.55. Westboro, Massachusetts clocked in at $4.46 a gallon. But the prize for my favorite place to gas up was at the Hixton Cheese Hut in Hixton, Wisconsin where the cows just might outnumber the people but where I filled up my tank at the all-American (and economical price) of just $3.46 a gallon.

Thank you, Wisconsin!

This is the inventory of gasoline prices I’ve paid on my annual August in America road trip, a journey I’ve undertaken for the past six summers, save for 2020’s COVID days. For me there is just something so relaxing and so liberating to travel by car, to take the wheel and then to go where I wish or where I want, with nothing holding me back but traffic and deciding which place I might stop at next. What exit to take, what backroads to explore and then stay for awhile.

But first, I had to leave one thing at home to fully enjoy and appreciate the adventure that lay ahead. I had to remember to not pack one specific point of view I’m too often tempted to take, especially when traveling and I encounter new people and places and foods, rituals, and cultures, which differ from my own cherished way of life.

To make it a soul expanding road trip, I had to refrain from judgment. From being judgy. From making ignorant or shortsighted judgments. I had to let go of any idea of “the norm” and thinking how others live is weird or wrong, because, well, “It’s not how I live!” Think ugly American. Think of the tourist who eschews the local food and instead tries and track down a McDonalds. The traveler who imagines that by just raising their voice and speaking louder in English, the locals might actually understand them.  Or the tourist who insists on negotiating a lower price while not taking into consideration the person who created that bauble, their dependence on this craft for their livelihood.

I may have picked up some of this travel judgyness from religion, clearly ignoring Jesus’ admonition to not judge, lest you be judged. There is something about all religions that tempts adherents to imagine themselves as better or closer to God because of their unique path to the divine. We can also fall prey sometimes to “norming”: thinking everyone else should or must live like we do. It’s the best way. Right?

The cure for this travel temptation is simple and makes not just for good trips but also a good life. It’s curiosity. That’s the attitude which encounters the world and says “WOW!” or “COOL!” or “I’ve never seen THAT before!” and then smiles. Curiosity is the commitment to bring an open mind and heart to whatever and whomever we encounter on God’s green earth, the main reason being (at least for me) that the world is such a precious place. You know, God made it and if something or someone is God made, then it is my job to treat them with respect, and even love, but most important with curiosity.

What can this situation or person teach me? What can I learn from this fellow child of God who seems, at first glance, so different than me?  What new things can I try for the first time?! That’s what really gets my travel blood flowing—the chance to try something I’ve never done before, or to meet someone I’ve never met before.

So, on this trip I was introduced to Friday night lights and big-time high school football in southern Ohio. What a hoot! Four thousand cheering fans and two marching bands and my friend’s son Will so excited to start his very first varsity game. GO BRONCOS! This is the road trip I finally got to visit the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota and learn everything there is to know about this culinary delight. I’m serious—for me, a joy in traveling is visiting not just the obvious but also the offbeat, the odd and the one of a kind and that is absolutely SPAM!  On my way through Appalachia, I stopped in the small town of Berea, Kentucky and was introduced to that region’s beautiful, handcrafted goods.  If I was not curious, I might have just passed it by.

What are you missing because judgment or fear of the unknown is holding you back? This world is such a spectacular, God created place, just overflowing with so, so much to experience. To eat. New music to listen to. New opinions to consider. New people who are just waiting to become a new friend.

But first on this road trip called life, we have to let go of the need to judge and embrace the spiritual virtue of curiosity. To wake up each and every day and ask, “OK world: what do you have to show me today?! What new idea am I needing to learn? Who is my next life teacher?”

Now it’s back to the road for the final few days of my trip. I can’t wait to see what today has in store for me. For you too, I pray.

Just be curious.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

   

 

The Answer To Climate Change May Be Blowin' In the Wind

"How many times can a man turn his head, And pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,  The answer is blowin' in the wind"  --Bob Dylan, 1963

I am driving on Route 90, the longest interstate highway in the United States at 3,021 miles. It’s an overcast, gray and misty August afternoon, somewhere in between Rockford, Illinois where I began my trip at 9 am and Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where I hope to arrive in time for supper.  Two-hundred ninety-one miles traveled, 121 miles to go. I’m on a summer road trip, my second in the past two years, as I itch to just get away from our still COVID pressed world. In almost three weeks of travel, I am exploring the United States on highways and byways and backroads. Searching for peoples and places I’ve yet to meet or explore.

I never know what I might find, and this day delivers an unexpected surprise.

As I climb a long but gentle highway hill, I see at the horizon a line of gargantuan constructs that rise up out of the unending fields of corn, alfalfa, and soybean fields in southern Minnesota. Like some unearthly collection of aliens, who chose to land their otherworldly crafts on to this landscape, these objects stand so tall, point so high up into the sky that I wonder if they might bump their heads on the clouds. Their oversized arms, three on each machine, lazily spin circles in the wind, like supersized pinwheels.

What I see are sixty-seven 1.5-megawatt General Electric wind turbines, scattered among the agricultural bounty that is Minnesota on these hot and high days of summer. These amazing modern-day monoliths, each standing more than 295 feet high, are sited in and around Dexter, Minnesota, population 341 souls. I’d say I was in the middle of nowhere but that would be rude, considering the folks who actually call this windswept part of the country home. They are the ones who plant and harvest the food we city folks and suburbanites sit down to eat, rarely giving thought or thanks to where our next meal comes from or who helped produce it, with God’s help.

And now these farmers are harvesting the wind too.

These turbines collectively generate enough power on an annual basis to provide energy to 39,000 homes, and it’s all clean and renewable and, increasingly, competitively priced with fossil fuels, like oil, natural gas, and coal. The turbines do not pollute or contribute CO2 to global warming. They are passive energy producing machines that harness natural, abundant, and theoretically endless energy.

I’ve seen these odd looking yet beautiful and graceful behemoths here in the mid-west and I’ve also viewed them dotting the peaks of hills in California and even spied a few spinning away off of Route 6 on the way to Cape Cod.  But the truth is that my home, Massachusetts lags far, far behind most other states in our wind energy production. Those turbines in and around Dexter produce 100.5 megawatts of power. My entire state produces just 120 megawatts of power.

It's not that we haven’t tried. More than fifteen years ago, Cape Wind was proposed by developers as a huge offshore wind farm, in the waters of Nantucket Sound, our nation’s first major ocean-based wind project. But it went down in failure, defeated by a flood of lawsuits concerning environmental issues, aesthetic concerns and fierce opposition from folks who lived closest to the project.

But there is finally some good news blowing in the wind for the Bay State.

Construction began last November on Vineyard Wind, sited about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket islands. This wind farm will include 62 turbines and when it goes live, will produce more than 800 megawatts of power, enough to provide electricity for 400,000 homes.  

So, there may be more in common than we think between the gently rolling hills of southern Minnesota, with its sea of crops, and the gently rolling waves off the coast of Massachusetts, with its sea of water. Both offer an abundance of wind. God’s creation in both places, in all places, is increasingly fragile, even broken in some parts. In Massachusetts we experienced two of the longest heat waves on record this summer and in the past three years, our summers have been the hottest ever recorded since record keeping began. Minnesota is becoming both warmer and wetter, hotter by some 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 and in the past decade, increasingly subject to violent spring and summer storms, that give way to flooding and crop damage. Wacky and scary weather knows no state boundaries.   

The distance between southern Minnesota and eastern Massachusetts is about 1,300 miles as the crow flies, two days or so by car, four hours by jet. Yet when it comes to the promise of renewable energy and the threat of climate change, we might as well be next door neighbors.  And that’s a good thing. 

Now it’s back to the road. What will I discover next? I’ve no idea and that is where the adventure lies and the fun too. May you find your own special road trip in these precious and waning days of summer.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.