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Sunday, April 20, 2014

Fully Alive


Fully Alive


A Sermon by the Rev. Connie Yost
preached on Easter at the UU Fellowship of McMinnville
4/20/14

As some of you know, I love to travel.  I just returned from a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, where my nephew was married.  It was a beautiful wedding at a fancy restaurant in the old historic city.  The city, which I had not visited since I was 10 years old, is a truly gracious and lovely place.  At this time of the year, the azaleas and dogwoods were blooming with glorious color, and the wisteria grew wild up the trees in the forest.

Weddings and spring are surely signs of hope and life.  It was the first wedding both sets of parents had experienced, and the mothers, especially, were ecstatic.  Being the slightly eccentric old auntie, I decided to go ahead and ask my nephew the question we all were dying to ask:  “Are you and Becca going to have kids?”  My sister and I waited in hopeful anticipation as my nephew cleared his throat and announced, “Becca says the official answer is ‘We hate kids’” but he was smiling so I knew that this was not true.  He went on to explain that they wanted to get a house first, get out of the inner city of Washington DC where they live, and then – yes, maybe then we will have kids, he said.  OR, I suggested, it could happen the old-fashioned way – SURPRISE!

 Well, that’s life, isn’t it?  SURPRISE!  And we are!  For some reason, most of us are surprised when stuff happens that is out of our control.  Whether a good thing or not, it takes us a while to grapple with the things that happen to us.