I’ll never forget my first Yellowhead Presbytery
meeting as the ministry rep from Athabasca.
Presbytery is where United church folks gather from churches in the
neighborhood to socialize and work together for the Kingdom of God. Yellowhead Presbytery gathers people from
over 40 churches from Lamont and Fort McMurray to Jasper and Hinton. That’s over 80!
I was nervous about meeting that many new people, and
wondering if I would recognize anyone.
Of course I did, especially one dear lovely lady who was as excited to
see me as I was to see her. I knew her
from our days at the University of Alberta where we sang together in the choir,
and she must have been around 18 when we first met.
I kept running into her at Naramata Center where for
one week a year in the summer, she loved and inspired my children, helping them
to grow in their faith and self-confidence.
I was thrilled and not surprised to hear that she had gone into
ministry, and very excited that she got posted back to Alberta from
Saskatchewan. So seeing her in Surprise
Lake Camp was wonderful.
As we entered the main room where the meeting was
going to be held, I wanted to sit up front near the big fireplace where a cozy
fire was warming the building on a blustery October day. It was very surprising to hear her ask if we
could sit at the back near the door where all the cold air was coming from.
The friend I was sitting with was Reverend Leigh
Sinclair, and some of you may remember her from my covenanting service which
she preached in this very spot.
At the time she was the President of Alberta North
West Conference (which is over 200 congregations from Cypress Hills to
Whitehorse), and she was a bundle of enthusiastic energy, brave, smart and deeply
Christian. She also had been evacuated
from Slave Lake.
The mere smell of campfire smoke was enough to trigger
her memories of fearful evacuation and even though it had been six months since
the fire, Leigh had not gone camping once over the summer. She was too busy providing pastoral care,
working with Conference staff to provide emotional and spiritual support for
the townspeople and dealing with her own needs.
One thing she hadn’t needed to worry about was her church, which was
left standing and became a center for much of the healing ministry she
undertook. Another thing she hadn’t
needed to worry about was her salary.
Across the conference, people had donated funds which supported her for
a short time and the surplus funded art therapy professionals to offer wrkshops
for both children and adults. So
Presbytery became the first time she encountered that smell, and the sight of
flames.
She could have run away from the meeting. She could have gotten angry at the
insensitivity of the organizers to put a fire in the meeting space. She could have pretended that she wasn’t
afraid and spent all her energy trying to repress anxieties, and not
concentrate on the business at hand.
Instead, she confided in a few folks that she trusted,
and sat in that room at a safe distance while taking deep breaths and praying
to find calmness and healing. She would
not allow herself to be enslaved to her fears, but reminded herself that she
was a child of God.
Fast forward 5 years.
Today Leigh is in Quebec, and has been communicating almost daily with
myself and Reverend Donalee from Fort McMurray.
She has become a pillar of strength and a supplier of calm support for
us both.
She has been praying for all the folks in Fort
McMurray, but also wanted to send her love to you again. She still remembers the wonderful ways that
Athabasca supported her and is grateful for that time of love and care. As she told us when she preached here 4 years
ago, Athabasca folks were a beacon of hope for many. It is not easy to do. We can get compassion fatigue and volunteer
burn out. We can find ourselves
replaying old griefs from our pasts or having emotional outbursts. We can feel resentful at all the publicity or
free stuff or the perceived profit-mongering of businesses in town. We can feel guilty that we have not done
more. We can become slaves to the
‘woulda coulda shoulda’ fears of unrealistic expectations. We surround ourselves with stuff or busy
activities.
Or we can remind ourselves that life is a
marathon. That as Christians we are
called to be real, and that we have an ally to support us through the good
times and the bad. We know that suffering
cannot always be avoided. Not to say
that we should stay in abusive relationships or stick to addictions in order to
suffer, but to recognize that they may be unhealthy coping mechanisms and the
pain of sobriety or loneliness may be the suffering that we deeply fear. Does that kind of suffering lead to a better
world for all? Of course not.
In the long run, in the marathon of life, if we truly
call ourselves Christian, we need to face suffering as Paul or Mary and Martha
or Peter, or Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus.
Jesus faced his own fears of losing his life – “take this cup from me”,
he prayed on his last night. He also told
his people of the comforting Spirit of truth.
Not the spirit of lies or pretending or fear, but the Spirit of Truth
which has always and will continue always to set us free from the slavery of
fear. May we all know that spirit of
truth and freedom. Amen.
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