Pastors Message – March 2014 

March is the month that introduces us once again to the promises of spring. Though most of us do not like going through winter (and especially a winter like the one we’ve had!), we must go through that season in order to get to spring.

Along with spring, we look forward to celebrating one of the most important seasons in our Christian faith: the season of Easter. Lent is the time in which we prepare our hearts to receive the promise of God’s life through Jesus’ resurrection.

The UCC Writer’s group shared a nice reflection that helps communicate this: 

“E. B. White, the famous writer of Charlotte’s Web and more, found his wife, Katherine, a brilliant editor at the New Yorker, in the last year of her life, placing daffodil bulbs gently into the Maine ground in October. She was ‘calmly plotting the resurrection,’ according to White. She knew she was sick, she knew she didn’t have long, but she did have hope. Surely she was afraid. But she wasn’t afraid enough to resist planting.” 

The fuller story of Katherine White’s stubbornly optimistic gardening is found in the word “plotting.” Before planting those bulbs, she spent weeks, perhaps months, drawing up her plans. Spring may come all by itself; but a garden, like a life well-spent even in the face of death, requires conscious planning. 

Here is E.B. White, from the introduction to the collection of Katherine White’s New Yorker Gardening essays,* which he collected and edited after her death: 

“As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.” 

It reminds me of another quote, by Martin Luther, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” 

May your own Lenten days be filled with the knowledge of yet another spring, yet another Easter when even death is conquered. 

I pray that during this season of Lent you will be about the work of plotting a good future. 

Lenten blessings, 

Pastor Diane