A MESSAGE FROM REV. LINDSEY ALTVATER CLIFTON: TIME FOR REFLECTION
Dear ones,
Much gratitude for your flexibility last Sunday as we gathered online for worship instead of in-person! Even with careful attention to local forecasters, it was difficult to know when the heaviest snow would arrive and how quickly conditions would deteriorate, so it was better to be on the safe side.
We were also concerned that the weather 
might keep people from attending the Steering Committee Update gathering, and we want to ensure that as many congregants as possible are able to participate. Since we are holding an Inquirers Seminar this Sunday after worship, the Steering Committee Update will be held in Fellowship Hall on Sunday, Feb. 2 following the 11:15 a.m. service.
Frigid temperatures and salty mess aside, I’ve appreciated the added beauty of the snowfall on our community’s landscape. Day or night, the added brightness has been lovely! It has reminded me of the gifts of winter, captured in this passage from Katherine May in her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times—
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavement sparkles. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.
Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin.
If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for awhile. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.
It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.
There’s a lot about that which resonates with our present moment as a congregation and as a nation. I pray that we’ll winter well together, friends… So that what needs to shed can be left behind; what needs to heal will have the time, space, and care to do so; what we need to embrace next will become clear and take root.
Prayers for the journey,
Lindsey