We invite you to worship with our faith community. We are a close-knit group of families, neighbors, and friends who strive to discover God’s direction for our lives. We encourage searching minds and spirits as we celebrate together our faith in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, through the guidance of the Holy Scriptures. Emphasizing individual choice and conviction, members follow the Word of God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Our church is called “Congregational”, reflecting our heritage in the New England Pilgrim experience in which local congregations retain control of their own decisions and direction. We are also a member church of the United Church of Christ denomination, which is dedicated to realizing God’s just and loving purpose in the world.
Pastor Donald B. Shenk
Read More…
FOR VISITORS
SUNDAY WORSHIP
10 a.m.
Communion Every First Sunday
PARADOX by Jennifer Brownell
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
– Psalm 139:16-18 (NRSV)
Somehow, before we were even born, we were both unformed and substance at the same time. In other words, we were both made and unmade, both spirit and flesh, both gas and solid.
I don’t know about you, but my life since then has not been any less contradictory.
Sometimes my feet stand solidly on the ground of faith and confidence, even as I float in the airy uncertainty of doubt and fear. Sometimes I look around with satisfaction at all my earthly riches, even as I wish the couch did not have an unsightly tear in the corner. Sometimes I find myself laughing at that one video of the corgi doing a belly flop off the end of a dock, even as images of children in cages break my heart.
When I notice these paradoxes, I can get paralyzed, believing that I must somehow experience only one thing or the other, only be one thing or another.
But we are made in the image of a God who also contains multitudes. At the beginning of this short passage, God has eyes to see and a book to write in. A few words later, God’s thoughts are described as infinite grains of sand. So is God a scribe bent studiously over a desk, or is God the most glorious, endless beach? Yes. God is these things, and so much more than you or I can imagine. And so you and I, created in the divine image, are much more than we can imagine, too.
Prayer
God—thank you for creating us, just as we are. Amen.