So often the experience of being in community with you all for worship is simultaneously heartrending and heartwarming – it breaks me open and it heals me, it challenges me and it validates me, over and over and over again.

Being in community with you all during worship today was this sort of both/and experience and for this, I’m grateful to everyone present in the Sanctuary and in our wider, broken open circle.

I’m also grateful for the way God – or in my way of understanding the universe, Love – made itself visible on the sanctuary floor in the shape of a messy, beautiful heart shadow. I’m still someone who hungers for miracles and who needs tangible signs, so it’s lovely when the universe humors me in this.

I noticed this messy heart shadow during the part of worship when Tory Trujillo was sharing Silent Night with us after providing her powerful, loving witness of what is happening today in Jesus’s homeland of Palestine.

It stayed through Kael Sherrard’s heartrending and heartwarming reading of Warsan Shire’s Home for our contemporary voice.

It was made possible because Cory Maclay decided to walk the labyrinth and left her shoes just so under her chair such that the shadow cast made a messy, beautiful heart there on the floor.

The option to walk the labyrinth was made possible by a loving series of out-of-the-box decisions and a lot of loving hands (and backs) that laid out the canvas.

So many elements came together to create this unexpected, ephemeral messy, beautiful heart that I feel moved to share it with you all as we hold one another in this tender, uncertain time.

May peace and love be yours to hold and to share,

Tracy Simpson