Dear Church Family and Friends,
In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Dillard is speaking of an ecstatic experience of the divine she once had while on a walk through nature. I love the image of one day discovering that you yourself are an instrument that reverberates to the sound of God’s music. Previously, you might have simply thought of yourself as being a plain, old piece of scrap metal, but then someone picks you up and shows you that you are so much more than that. You are a co-conspirator in God’s plan to fill the world with song.
Imagine that today is the day you discover your inherent bell-ness. What hymns of love are reverberating within your soul? What notes might you be ready to raise yourself? Might you be the one who brings a joyful melody into someone else’s life today? Can you play the chords that lift another’s spirit? We can sound our notes in big and small ways. Like the lyrics to Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” we can be the bell that rings in the morning and evening. We can be the bell that rings out danger and warning. We can be the bell that rings out “love between, my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.”
May this be a day in which you experience and affirm the bell-ness that is within us all.
Your brother in Christ,
Pastor Brooks