Live to Learn, Learn to Live

My child, if you accept my words and treasure up my commandments within you,

making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding;

if you indeed cry out for insight, and raise your voice for understanding…

Then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.   (Proverbs 2:1-3,5)

I always look forward to opportunities to learn new things, and my time of continuing ed last week did not disappoint. 

My first great learning occurred even before I left town, at Lutheran Campus Ministry’s fall workday.  Through a morning of tidying up gardens, I learned (again) that I am exceedingly allergic to poison ivy.  I have been surprisingly reluctant to take this teaching to heart, but no more. I renounce my former ways of carefree gardening. More on topic, it was good to spend an early autumn morning working with friends from other NCCo Lutheran congregations as well as LCM students to take care of the property entrusted to the gem that is campus ministry at UD. 

I spent the first part of my week away at The Claggett Center, an Episcopal retreat in Maryland’s Frederick County, for the bishop’s annual Leadership Retreat. The Rev. Kenneth Wheeler offered the opening lecture, drawn from his book US: The Resurrection of American Terror, about the rising threat of white supremacy in our nation. Bishop Gohl called Pastor’s Wheeler’s book one of the best and most accessible on the topic. Over lunch a day later, I discovered Pastor Wheeler’s connection to Wilmington through Pastor Clarence Pettit, recently retired from Unity Lutheran Church. Maybe it’s a “Delaware thing,” but especially here you don’t have to look far to see how interconnected we are, with life-giving relationships just below the surface of what is readily visible.

The rest of our structured time was filled with bible study on the Passion account in Luke (coming to a church near you in Lent 2025), led by The Rev Dr Kevin Vandiver, and exercises in Creative Worship planning, led by The Rev Victoria Larson.  Although these tracks were independent of each other, they both emphasized the wisdom of Community over the expertise of a single voice, the power of honest questions to reveal unexpected truth, and the potential birthed when we lean into mutual interdependence rather than trying to go it alone.  Words of life!

I returned home from the Leadership Retreat in time to attend Pacem in Terris’s annual speaker event at the Wilmington Library, featuring Dr.  Christina Watlington’s talk “Breaking the Cycle: Healing Generational Trauma.”  Dr. Watlington’s points about strength in vulnerability, truth-telling as a means of liberation, and genuine community as a source of hope and life resonate with the good news we know in Jesus.

Along with some self-directed reading, I finished my week with a few days of escape to Cambridge, Massachusetts where Kevin and I visited our youngest daughter in her new grad school neighborhood.  I’m grateful for time away to be refreshed by intentional learning and chance encounters.  They help me “find knowledge of the Lord” as, together, we do our work to love, to invite, to serve.

Gratefully,

Pastor Sue