Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,
Have you ever had to learn a lesson from the most unlikely of persons?
In this week’s gospel, we hear the story of Jesus healing ten people of leprosy. To prove they were cured, and that they could fully rejoin the community and be a part of worship, a person with leprosy had to present themselves to a priest.
On the way to the priest, one of those healed realized they indeed were healed and turned back to say thank you.
That person was not an Israelite, a person like Jesus.
That person was a person that was disliked by the Israelites, who the Israelites avoided.
It was that person who did the right thing, demonstrated what to do when good things happen.
Let’s be open to learning how to live well and live the Jesus way from unexpected places. Let’s join in giving thanks when good things happen.
In faith, love, and service,
holly+
(October 12, 2025)
Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,
Deacon Sue and I spent the past few days with about twenty other clergy from the Dioceses of Northern Indiana and Indianapolis—staring, for hours on end, at a block of wood that would eventually become an icon of Jesus the Pantokrator. The process required incredible patience and precise instruction—both of which, at several points, I wasn’t sure I possessed.
At one moment, I was convinced I’d finally succeeded in transforming Jesus’s mitten-shaped hands into something that actually resembled human ones—only to realize I had accidentally given Jesus six fingers! I dissolved into laughter, but my heart also sank, feeling momentarily like a failure. That feeling didn’t last long; a quick swipe of paint covered the extra finger, and the work went on. But it captured the range of emotions that marked the experience—frustration and joy, humility and wonder, all mingled together.
At the final Eucharist, all of our completed icons surrounded the altar. Though each of us began with the same line drawing of Jesus the Pantokrator, every icon was unique. Each one reflected its maker’s heart, hands, and prayers. It reminded me how God reveals God’s self to each of us in deeply personal ways.
When it came time to pick up our icons to be blessed, I almost didn’t recognize mine. Enough time had passed since I’d last stared at every imperfection that I could now see it differently—from a distance, no longer fixating on flaws, but seeing only Jesus the Pantokrator, Sustainer of the World.
May Jesus sustain us all.
In faith, love, and service,
holly+
(October 19, 2025)
Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,
The song echoed through camp as the campers lined up for Eucharist, each one receiving, then joining hands in a circle around the altar.
Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord.
They swayed gently, their voices overlapping, echoing one another with the words of Luke 18.
And God,
Will lift
You up,
Higher and higher.
Did I know what this meant as a child? As a teenager?
Do I truly understand what it means now?
Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord.
In Luke 18:9–14, Jesus tells of two people who go up to the temple to pray. One appears outwardly spiritual, doing all the right things, but full of arrogance and contempt for others. The other is painfully aware of having missed the mark, standing humbly before God.
Jesus asks: who was justified? Who was made right?
And God,
Will lift
You up.
God makes right not the one who appears righteous, but the one who humbles themselves before God—the one who doesn’t need to tear others down to lift themselves up.
It’s a tough piece of “Jesus wisdom” for a world that often seems to believe that might makes right. Humility doesn’t mean refusing to stand up for ourselves. It means doing so without standing on top of someone else.
And still, around campfires and sanctuaries alike, the song continues to echo—the wisdom of Luke 18 set to melody:
Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord,
And God will lift you up.
In faith, love, and service,
holly+
(October 26, 2025)
Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,
This Sunday we celebrate one of the Episcopal Church’s high holy days: All Saints’ Day and the day after, All Soul’s Day.
All Saints’ Day (November 1) is the day we celebrate people who are exemplars in the faith—people who have gone before us and demonstrated how to live life with God.
This includes Red Letter Saints, people present in the New Testament like our namesake, St. Paul, and others like Phoebe.
Black Letter Saints are people whose lives the church commemorates. These include Benedict of Nursia, the father of modern monasticism, who died in 540, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who died at the hands of the Nazis in WWII. (For more information or a full list of Episcopal saints, click here.
All Saints are commemorated on the date of their death.
I write this on the anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death, an amazing woman of faith. The Anglican perspective is that while we honor specific people as exemplars, all of us who are following Jesus are being made saints. That brings me to the next special day: All Souls’ Day.
All Souls’ Day (November 2) allows us to remember those we know personally who have gone before us and are no longer with us.
This Sunday we will mark both All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day together. We remember those people throughout time that we look up to and learn from, holy people, saints. We specifically remember those we have lost to death this year on All Souls’. At St. Paul’s we take quiet time during the service to remember, to pray, to light candles, to grieve.
Through it all, we ask God to make us saints—to make us people who are following the way of Jesus. We love others, we muddle through life, we confess when we make a mess of it all. We live this life with God. And through it, God redeems us and makes us saints.
Let us celebrate All Saints’ and All Soul’s Day together.
In faith, love, and service,
holly+
(November 2, 2025)
Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,
A surprising image from this week’s passage in Isaiah – a new green plant, a shoot, coming from something that is supposed to be dead, a stump.
New life from something that was not just past its prime.
Hope in unlikely places.
I love Advent. I love the reminders of hope, that contrasts a life that is a mess with the dreams of life with God. I love exploring ways to define hope – it’s not optimism, it’s not positivity. Hope has this substance, not only an ability to see that life could be different but a desire to work toward it.
Isaiah’s vision of this new green shoot offers a vision of a different world from the one Isaiah was living through, one full of the threat of war and take over. He calls for a peaceable kingdom, one that, while seemingly impossible, is worth working toward.
Because hope blooms in unlikely places.
May you see those new blooms in spaces you once thought were dead, no matter what is going on in your own world. May we have eyes to define hope and work for it in our world.
In faith, love, and service,
holly+
(December 7, 2025)