Brownsboro F.U.M.C.
by The Elliots

The Folding

Imagine with me a mixing bowl. It is full of whipped cream. Now, imagine a saucepan. It is full of melted chocolate. If I didn't have your attention before, I suspect I have it now!

Gently pour the contents of the saucepan into the whipped cream. Now, with a gentle bottom to-top circular motion, combine the two ingredients. This gentle motion, as you know, is called "folding."

Now that you have folded the chocolate into the cream, look at the bowl's contents. Everything that made the whipped cream what it was is still in there, but something is different. What has been added has changed the bowl's contents forever.

That is a picture of the way in which we deal with loss. Loss is a part of life. Loss always involves grief, because loss always involves change. And, even if a change is a welcomed one, there is grief, because every new beginning presupposes an ending, too.

Loss takes myriad forms and has myriad faces.

You lose your job. Your last child leaves for college. Your first child enters kindergarten. One of your loved ones dies. A pastor you love is reassigned. You are diagnosed with an illness. You are married. You are divorced. A child is born. You graduate from college. You retire. A long-held way of thinking about things is challenged. A devastating storm hits the Gulf Coast, and the resulting suffering is beyond our ability to imagine.

Each of these experiences involves loss, in one form or another. A new dynamic, wanted or unwanted, has come to us. And, now, we begin the work of incorporating this new reality into the bowl that is our soul. We will never be the same again.

This sobering truth is at the heart of one of the Church's ninth-century liturgies. "In the midst of life, we are in death."

Loss touches us in one way or another throughout our lives, and loss involves much more than death alone. That's why we have each other.

In the Church, we mutually bear one another's burdens. We help each other carry what no person can carry all alone. We reach out with love and embrace when those around us are struggling with the difficult soul work of folding.

Truth be known, there is folding going on with most of us all the time. That's why our realtionships with each other should be characterized by gentleness and encouragement and tender acceptance and love.

Know that your pastors are here to help you with your folding. And, know of my gratitude for the ways in which you love and reach out -- to each other and to the world, helping those you encounter do the work of folding in their lives.

God bless! -Bro. Ernest