Weekly E-Letter
From Nori’s comments in the 6-12-13 e-letter:
Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
—Olive Schreiner
This Sunday we will celebrate Father’s Day. Father’s Day was instituted in 1910 by Sonora Dodd who wanted to honor her own father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War Veteran who raised his six children alone. Sonora got the idea after listening to a Mother’s Day sermon in her church. Click here to read the e-letter.
From Nori’s comments in the 6-5-13 e-letter:
To change masters is not to be free. Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves. – Florence Ellinwood Allen
This Sunday we will be marking the celebration of Juneteenth. This memorializes the day when the slaves in Texas finally got word that they had been freed — some 19 months following the Emancipation Proclamation President Abraham Lincoln made on January 1, 1863. It took until June 19, 1865 for the Texan slaves to hear. All that time they had been laboring under the illusion that they were in bondage to their white slave owners.
Click here to read the e-letter.
From Nori’s comments in the 5-29-13 e-letter:
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
At last the weather seems to have gotten the memo that winter is over and that it is time now for verdant, lush greenery and budding trees. Better late than never, the rain has been a boon for our parched land over the past few weeks. Now school is out and those of us with children are busily planning vacations or arranging for week long day camps or day care. Click here to read the e-letter.
From Nori’s comments in the 5-22-13 e-letter:
I’m sure many of you, 
like me, were consumed by the news coverage of the series of tornadoes that ripped through Oklahoma this past week. Although the main focus was on the mile-wide tornado that bore down on Moore, OK, there were also others that struck Oklahoma the day before that also resulted in the loss of human life and property.
At times like these, it seems as if humankind has the opportunity to shine brightly amid the darkness of destruction and despair. Amid the horror stories of lives lost and homes destroyed, anecdotes of volunteers and aid workers and miraculously found pets season the event with hope and love. Click here to read the e-letter.
From Nori’s comments in the 5-15-13 e-letter:
“The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence; not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.” - W.E.B. DuBois
There is no one action, no single thought or deed or impulse of the heart that makes a life worth living, nor is there a single person, a single hour of time given, a single song or reading or time of washing up the dishes after Fellowship hour that makes a church a living, breathing entity, filled with compassion, warmth and love. Click here to read the e-letter.
