Getting Lost in the Woods

  So much has happened this year. The fruit of seeds planted, tended, and cared for over these last seven years. It may even go further back than I recognize.  Those earlier years were a blur of constant motion, rapid growth and change. Jason and I fell in love, graduated from college, took jobs, changed jobs, started graduate school, grieved a miscarriage, and rejoiced in a pregnancy that gave us our sweet and wonderful Logan.  There was the ordination process and eventually ordination; we moved from house to house, and delighted in a pregnancy that ended abruptly early, but gave us our loving, red-headed Lucas. We stumbled our way in love, grace, and the occasional expletive, as we learned what it meant to be married, to share a home and a life, to become parents, to figure out what it meant to be adults, to begin to recognize who we are and a bit about why God has made us.  The season of our life before moving to Greenfield was rich, beautiful, and could be described as ‘go big or g

Who taught you how to pray?  This is the question Matt Skinner, a Luther Seminary professor, reflected on in his  Dear Working Preacher column  focused on this  Sunday's gospel lesson .  He wrote,  "It’s a very personal, intimate thing, one’s prayer life. Getting started at praying is less like learning how to drive a car, how to play the banjo, or even how to preach. For most, it is more like learning how to kiss. You learn some by watching others do it. You should be discerning about whom you will allow to teach you. You certainly make mistakes. And maybe you always worry deep in your head that you might be doing it wrong." Learning how to pray really is a good deal like learning how to kiss.  In New England, we generally don't talk about kissing or praying, or at least not beyond the dutiful agreement to hold someone else in our prayers.  Instead we often stumble into these practices.  Growing up, there was never a parental conversation about learning how to kiss,