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So I was doing a deep dive into Julian of Norwich's work when I hit a snag in my writing and so I hopped over to twitter and I posted All Shall be Well, All shall be well,

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all manner of things shall be well. It's my mantra. It's Julian sentence. And even if you don't know anything about the mystic, you just might know that sentiment. Those words moved from the time

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that Julian lived in the bubonic plague, ravaged europe and then went underground as cloistered women red transcribed and guarded her thought the words now grace wall plaques and armed tattoos for so long, they've hung on the

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lips of saints and they've served as a meditation throughout the ages. But in typical twitter style, people began to argue with the words in DMS in person and online a discussion arose, How can we say

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all shall be well when Joy George Floyd had been murdered with such casual cruelty, how could we say all shall be well, when there was so much injustice in the world, how could we say all

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shall be Well when a Coronas virus was ripping through the nation, killing thousands of people a day I began to wonder if I was just speaking out of a position of privilege. Maybe I didn't even have

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the right to say such words. I scrolled through the mess, realizing the hot stew of anxiety and rage that were simmering in right now. Social media , it's like a little monster that feeds off of

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our heightened emotions are ravaged a middle. I create these dopamine induced highs and adrenaline fueled furies. All of the algorithms can cause a mob panic, depression or despair. It's like we have this invisible puppet

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master pulling our strings. They have trained us with Pavlovian responses to become outraged. Buy everything from horrible injustices to Bernie Sanders, memes. And it's not just on twitter right now. It's in our churches

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, to sickness, death, unemployment and eviction flood our church members and their loved ones. And too many times members begin to project all of that panic onto us. So how can we utter the words

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all shall be well in the midst of this as pastors and church workers, though we simply cannot live in a constant state of panic. It's just not good for our souls. Even as justice seekers and

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activists, especially as justice seekers and activists, the constant heightened state of raw anxiety can draw us into despair. We've got to take care of ourselves. Sometimes. The one thing that can get us out

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of a horrible situation is the belief that we're going to make it out of a horrible situation, gives us resilience, Julian, of Norwich can draw us out of despair and into hope because Julian does not

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come to this conclusion, that all shall be well out of a position of privilege. She comes to it in a time of intense suffering. She realizes the truth that all shall be well. When she

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picks up a hazelnut, she looks down at the seed and meaning begins to reverberate from it. Julian senses that the hazelnut contains the whole world. This in itself is fascinating to me because Julian lived about

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150 years before Galileo's telescopes or Magellan's journey's proved that the earth was round. I think most people believed that the earth was flat. But somehow she understood that she held the whole world and the palm of

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her hand. And as she helped it, she understood that God created it. God preserved it and God loved it. And if God created and preserved and love the hazelnut thank God created and preserved and

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loved the world. So her sense of wellness did not depend on the moment by moment hot take. But it was rooted in creation. It was created by stepping back and having a sense of perspective,

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God created it. God preserves it. God loves it. I spoke to a pastor recently who had a session who decided that they would not meet in person in the sanctuary until a vaccine became widely available

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. So this pastor hunkered down. She worked incredibly hard to make sure that all of the church services were online. It was an older congregation and she was a solo pastor and the church didn't have a

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lot of resources and she was really the only one who could manage the shift onto the internet. And so she became a tele evangelist overnight. She made sure that the church was on facebook and Youtube.

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She redesigned the church website to be sure that the link for the services were on the home page. She made sure that the retired people in her congregation learned how to use zoom so they could a tomb

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attend meetings. She made sure that the online giving worked on the website and instructed people on how to do that She was working for hung from her home office, sometimes in yoga pants and she never quit

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. She began to recreate all of the sunday school opportunities and the congregational meetings. So everything was online or it was outside. And after months of 12 hour days, she was so relieved she could hardly

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believe that she had gotten such a monumental amount of work done. Then at the end of the year , when it was time for stewardship and the elders began to reach out for pledges, people were not

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as responsive. The pledges went down and when they followed up on those people who did not pledge, the people responded, well, I don't know why we should give to a church that's closed. It's

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not like the pastor is doing anything. She heard that sentence. She had such exhaustion and anger that it took everything in her power not to just break down and cry. It's difficult when were depleted in

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our calls, especially when we're rubbing up next to people who are also raw and anxious. We don't know what we should do, but I'm telling you , we can learn from Julian. We can get

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out of our cloistered cell and begin to exploit, explore nature, pick up an interesting leaf. Listen to it. Speak to us start a garden marvel at the bluebonnets. Our bodies were not made to

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be looking at these flat screens all day long. Many of us have not had any semblance of vacations . Since all of this started, we have to take care of ourselves and that means making sure that

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we disconnect from the screen and we reconnect with the wonder and the beauty of the hazelnut. You've got to give God a chance to whisper into our ears , allow ourselves to have that sense of awe and

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wonder. So we think about how God created it . God created us stunning declaration that all shall be well even in the midst of suffering did not come from doom scrolling every political outraged. But the truth

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was anchored in creation in creation will help us out of the anxious mess that we are all in right now. God created it. God preserves it. God loves it. When we get a matter of

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perspective, we realize how much nature nurtures us and preserves us our well being is intimately attached to. Nature. Studies have found that even if you put a plant in your room, it will help you

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in your sense of health and wellness. It was not just Julian who became distracted from her pain by contemplating the hazelnut. We can all tolerate pain better when we look at a tree, God preserves nature

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in nature restores us. At one point, I gotta admit, I did begin to wonder if Julian was right about this one. Does God preserve the hazelnut? We know what's happening to the environment every

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day. The ice caps are melting, the water level is rising, oceans are warming and it's killing fish. Once fertile land is no longer inhabitable. And so I wondered about Julian's truth. Here,

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Will God preserve the hazelnut? I think so, Maybe this is too dark. I am pretty sure that the natural world around us will be fine, but the humans that inhabit it, we might destroy

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ourselves from bombs to pollution, We often seem absolutely determined to destroy ourselves. And if that happens then the amazing world will grow around us and heal the land. It will eventually cleanse itself of the toxicity

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that we have caused. But maybe we could avoid it too if we begin to reconnect and maybe we can have a bit of solace knowing that God will preserve this beautiful world with or without us. God

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created it. God preserves it. God loves it . When we look at nature, we can become absolutely enamored by the intricacies of it. A leaf , a nut. A tree is so complex that

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we are constantly learning about them right now. People are beginning to understand how trees talk to one another through root systems and things I don't understand because I went to seminary instead of taking science courses, these

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trees, they let one another know about the dangers that are ahead or poisons that might threaten them. The more people learn and understand about old growth ecosystems , the more unbelievable and amazing they become and the

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more they understand how God preserves us. God made the world just as God made the seed and that tiny nut had the potential to become a tree with incredible hardiness that can stand for generations, producing sustenance

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as it does in the palm of her hand, Julian understood God's love. It was compact and it was emanating because what else other than love can create such a marvelous thing. Friends, it's time to

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step back. It's time to gain some perspective. Many of you have been working hard and long under brutal and exhausting circumstances. Many of you have been taking care of a congregation that is full of anxiety

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. Be because they don't know if the church will survive this. So many people are projecting their own fears in their own anxieties on you and you have been carrying these around these burdens for almost a year

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now. Okay, you must remember that God has called you to ministry in this time and in this place because God wants to make all things well and it's time for you to set those burdens down just

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for a little while to breathe in and to breathe out and to gain some perspective and to remember that wisdom that has been transmitted from plague to pandemic all shall very well all shall be well, all manner