A Prayer For TDOV

A Prayer for Trans Day of Visibility

Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), every year, seems increasingly important to celebrate. We live in a world that increasingly sees and names trans-ness as a threat, something that should be hidden or denied. Here in the state of Missouri, and around the USA, there are countless bills that are going through the house and senate that aims to make the life of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folks more challenging. It can be easy to get caught up in the despair, heartache, and exhaustion.

So, I am grateful for a day like TDOV, that recenters me on the joy, celebration, and the beauty it is to both be trans and know and love other trans people. TDOV brings me back to the sacred truth that trans life is holy, radiant, creative, and oh so joyful.

On this Trans Day of Visibility, I want to honor and uplift the people in my life whose becoming made it possible for me to live more fully and authentically. I am held by trans elders who made ways out of no way, who dared to bloom in conditions that were never meant for their thriving; whose blooming made me realize that I was allowed to bloom too.

Today, I am especially holding onto the truth that joy and play are not a distraction from struggle, but that joy and play are key to resistance. Joy and play are survival. Joy and play are divine. I am reminded that trans delight is intentional.

My prayer for this Trans Day of Visibility is wrap every trans person, known and unknown, in a warm and loving embrace. I pray we find time to play, create, and dance. I pray we imagine new worlds and get glimpses of the world as it is meant to be. I pray for rest and nourishment to wash over our bodies. I pray for delight to find us, in small and in big ways. I pray for our own becoming(s) to feel more and more possibile as each day passes. I pray for all of us to be reminded the more wholly we our ourselves, the closer we are to God.

And I pray that we remember, deep in our bones, that we can trust our hearts. That we are grounded in the truth that there is nothing accidental about our existence. I pray we call can shout with confidence and love that trans-ness is sacred, holy, and beautiful. I pray for a day that everyone can see, know, affirm that truth.

With love to each of you,
Pastor Eli

The Gift of Getting Lost

When I was studying abroad in Rouen, France our professor had us meet at the train station early on the first day of class to show us the easiest way to get to campus. Centrally located, the station sits near the iconic Rouen Cathedral—the one Claude Monet spent years painting—making it easy to spot from almost anywhere in the city.

That morning, we stepped out from our host families’ homes both excited and nervous for our first full day of class en français. By the end of the day, after hours of speaking only French, we were exhausted! So, most of us decided to walk together from the hill where the university sat back down toward the train station to get a little exercise (and speak a little english) before returning to our immersive French homes. But when we arrived, we realized none of us actually knew how to get home.

For the next several hours, we wandered—walking and walking, searching for something familiar besides the train station and the cathedral. At first, it felt like a quest, an adventure where a hot meal and familiar faces awaited our arrival. But slowly, the adventure wore thin. We bickered, argued over the map, and grew frustrated that none of us had thought to write down better directions (this was before you could use GPS for anything!) Rouen, with its medieval streets and high-walled homes, has a way of making everything look the same.

Eventually, one by one, we each found our way home—but only after finding the courage to ask a shopkeeper or café owner for help.

It was in that experience I learned this: when you are lost, you can still be found—but only when you swallow your pride, surrender to your surroundings, and ask for help.

Where are you feeling lost? Who can you ask for help?

May God guide us with earthy companions to help us when we are lost and for the comfort the Spirit who guides us "home" through prayer and reflection.

Blessings and Love,
Pastor Lauren

The Gift of Emptiness

Do you perceive the glass as half full or half empty?

The way you answer this question allegedly reveals whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. Sure, it does get at your perspective—do you focus on what you have or what you don’t? The reality of human life is that we need to focus on each in turn. We need to deal with both what is present and what is missing. 

Lent brings that same attention to our spirituality. It asks us to consider what is missing in our relationship with the Divine and what about our life is getting in the way. 

This week, as we turn to The Gift of Emptiness, I’m interrogating the automatic negative often put onto the word empty. If you perceive the glass to be half empty, doesn’t that mean that there is space for more? Emptiness can be an opportunity for something new. For growth. Emptiness can also be a chance to stop. To let go of the push for busy-ness and noise. To resist the urge to “fix what’s wrong” and recognize what is right. To sit in the still and the quiet and notice the Spirit moving and God speaking. 

The Lenten season is almost half over. The season has a little more than half to go. At this near-middle, I invite you to recognize what you have gained and acknowledge that you have more to go. That balance is the essence of our journey. It is the essence of this life.

Blessings,
Pastor Tijuana 

The Gift of Being Thunderstruck

Gift of Being Thunderstruck

For those of us who live in Missouri, it feels like the weather has begged us to pay attention to God's voice thundering in the clouds all week long. Last night, many of us were kept awake by her flashes of lightning illuminating the skies of our ceilings.

How is God speaking to you this week? How has God been present to you in a new way, or in an old way that has been reframed. This week, my heart has been heavy within our global and our local communities. My heart is broken seeing the coffins of little girls whose school was bombed. My heart is broken for many of our matriarchs who have been in an out of the hospital this week: Ms. Jackie, Barb Payne, Rev. Betty, and Rosie.

And, when my heart has been heavy, I have seen the rain of the sky as God's tears. The thunder as God's anger. The lightning as a reminder of the surprising and luminous ways God shows up. So, this week, I give thanks for the thunder and thanks for the lightning. I give thanks for the budding of the tulips in my garden and for the geese honking their way back home.

After  —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

[These days] after
my country bombed
a girls’ school
across the world,
part of me does not
wish to meet the day.
But just after dawn,
I wake to the relentless
honking, honking
of geese returning
from far away
to make a home again
in our yard.
I want to rewrite
yesterday so every girl
who went to school
also came home
to her family,
so every mother and father
woke this morning knowing
their child was safe in their bed.
I am so filled with horror—
we killed them—
I don’t know how to rise.
But the great noise
of the geese returning,
that harsh and strangled sound,
pulls me into the world
to meet whatever the day brings.
A goose wanders past my window,
regal with her long black throat,
proof that life goes on.
Even when we can’t imagine how.
Even then.  

Blessings,
Pastor Lauren

The Gift of Uncertainity

Gift of Uncertainty 

One week after reading a particularly challenging book in book club, we discussed how it would be nice if everyone got what they wanted and none of the hard things happened. In the conversation, though, we realized that we’d never read a book where there is no conflict and everything is perfect -- uncertainty is the thing that binds us with the stories becuase life is uncertain no matter our plans or attempts to make it certain. The reason we are interested in a story is because we want to see the process of overcoming, we want to experience the embodiment of hope alongside the characters, we want to see good win over evil. 

When studying the Book of Revelation, many of us were upset by the idea that in heaven there might not be any more tears. Of course, I want an end of the tears that are shed because of violence and tragedy, but I want tears of joys, tears of laughter, tears of surprise in heaven. 

This week, we have been leaning into the gift of uncertainty, a quote from John Ortberg’s Faith and Doubt has stuck with me: “We all think we want certainty. But we don’t. What we really want is trust, wisely placed. Trust is better than certainty because it honors the freedom of persons and makes possible growth and intimacy that certainty alone could never produce.”

People look for new jobs when work feels stagnant. Marriages can unravel when spontaneity disappears. We put down books with no conflict. While there are forms of uncertainty — violence, illness, natural disasters — that we would never choose, I wonder how we might intentionally welcome other kinds of uncertainty into our lives.

What surprises might we find when we shake things up a bit? 

Start a conversation we’ve been avoiding.

Take a class in something we’ve always been curious about.

Pray without a script.

Invite someone new to the table.

Say yes when we would normally say no.

Perhaps the uncertainty we choose — the holy kind — is not chaos but possibility. Perhaps it is the space where trust grows, where love deepens, where we discover parts of ourselves we didn’t know were waiting.

What surprises might meet us there?

Blessings,
Pastor Lauren

Embracing the Gifts of the Dark Wood

This Lent, we are invited to embrace the Gifts of the Dark Wood. These are the moments when hope feels distant, when clarity fades, and when everything familiar falls away. These are not moments we would choose, but they are often the very places where something unexpected begins to grow. When everything else is stripped away, we are able to see what truly remains, what is unable to be taken away, and whose presence has been there all along. 

Lent reminds us that faith, wholeness, and even glimpses of heaven are not found in the absence of struggle, but in the very heart of it. This does not mean suffering is sent by God, is the result of inaction from God, or that hardship is something to be glorified. Rather, it means that when we find ourselves in those dark and tender places, we may discover what is most essential. We may discover what endures. We may discover a love that does not leave us.

And yet, if we are honest, it can be incredibly difficult to see God in the midst of heartbreak and hardship. It can be difficult to find any sense of meaning when we or those we love are hurting.

Rev. Lauren and I attended the Faith and Justice Rally on the Martin Luther King Bridge, and we heard countless stories of the fear and violence that is being done to our immigrant siblings and families. People who are human, people who have found a home in America, people who have children, people who have jobs, people who just want to live a happy life who are fearful and scared for their very lives. Tears fell down the faces of so many people as we heard and held these stories. 

And alongside that, we saw God in organizations that provide clothing, food, transportation, and safety to those who have been wrongfully detained by ICE. We saw God in voices lifted together in songs of resistance, in prayers of hope, in cries for justice. We saw God when our hearts broke open for one another instead of turning away. We knew standing there together, that God’s heart was surely breaking beside us all, crying out for all of us who were lost, uncertain, and exhausted.

We were a witness to something greater than our present circumstances, and being called to be courageous. We were being called to action. Called to be a beloved family. We saw hands reach for one another and refuse to let go. We saw courage rise in the face of fear and uncertainty. We saw people of different races, immigration statuses, and faith traditions stand together, united by love. I do not know if we can always see God in suffering itself. But I believe with my whole heart that we can see God in what rises from the ashes.

In this season of Lent, as we walk through our own Dark Woods together, in our own places of uncertainty, grief, and vulnerability, may we remember this truth: the dark is not empty. It is not barren. It is not the end of the story. It is the place where God meets us, holds us, and reminds us that even here, especially here, we are not alone.

In Solidarity,
Pastor Eli

Reverberations of Love in Community

I have to say, I am a sucker for the heart-shaped items that are prolific in the days leading up to Valentine's Day. This week, when visiting someone in the Heart Hospital, I delighted in the heart-shaped balloons that adorned the hallway while nurses sported hearts on their scrubs. While it's fun to think about St. Valentine and the revolutionary weddings he performed that led us to a weekend we celebrate romantic love, I was moved this way in celebration of the love of community. 

This week, at the Maplewood City Council Meeting, nearly 10 people spoke in support of an overnight prayer vigil that has taken place at Maplewood UMC during the coldest nights this winter. Maplewood, a city within St. Louis County, is a quirky municipality known for wholesome festivals, good restaurants, and a supportive community. So, it might stand out that there is a restriction that prevents an emergency shelter from being set up in the City of Maplewood. 

Maplewood UMC went into action. Knowing they couldn’t have a shelter, they set up an overnight prayer vigil for peace and justice to bring together anyone in the community who wanted to pray for their neighbors and pray for each other throughout the night. 

In the downstairs fellowship hall, adorned with twinkle lights and round tables, the room buzzed with sweet energy of communion when I came for my first shift at 4am. In our tradition, we celebrate communion as a sacred meal Jesus shared with his friends and disciples, a time to reflect, to mourn, to pray, and to prepare for the work of community away from the table. Communion does not need wine or bread, though. Communion is about sharing hope, delight, and space to be vulnerable. When I joined the table at 4am, I couldn’t tell who was a pastor and who a congregant; who a member of MUMC and who from the community. Surely some came to escape the physical cold, looking for warmth in the middle of the night. Others came to escape the chill of the heart reverberating in our news cycles, our fears, and our nightmares. At the table, we shared everything from very personal situations to national headlines. Prayer and communion were shared in the middle of the night, a time when most of us have to face our insecurities alone. Maplewood UMC made a way for us to share them on a night when vulnerability was felt even more acutely, when the thermometer read far below zero. 

Throughout the section for public comment, person after person (including our own Maplewood resident Deborah Sheperis) came forward offering loving support for such prayer vigils and told stories of love incarnate experienced in sharing a table, stories, and perhaps a nap in the middle of the night. 

As we celebrate the gift of love in our community, I am heartened by the city of Maplewood, whose residents and council members are finding a way to work within the system to support vulnerable people now while also trying to change the system for more substantive support later. 

How are you noticing the reverberations of love in your life? 

Blessings,
Pastor Lauren