Have you seen the "Tacky Traveling Toilet" yet? It graced my office a few weeks ago. As the children are learning about issues related to water in summer RE, the 4s&5s class is sponsoring this fundraiser for The Water Project. What a great idea! The children decorate the toilet and people pay to have it delivered to friends, who are then invited to support the project with a
donation.
I'm so proud of our wonderful RE staff and volunteers for developing this fantastic summer program for our children. We will celebrate their work and consider, ourselves, issues related to water this coming weekend at both services. This will be John Monroe's final weekend as our summer minister. (The following weekend we welcome our new Intern Minister, Eve Stevens.)
As a way of drawing the summer programming to a close, we will celebrate water communion at both services this weekend. Water communion services are held in many Unitarian Universalist congregations this time of year. Members bring water from home or from travels to mingle together. (We provide water as well.) I have always enjoyed the powerful symbolism of water - its creative and destructive properties.
Here is a wonderful water story from Bruce Larson's book, "Dare to Live Now."
"Travelers across a long and seldom used trail in the Amargosa Desert would pass an old pump that offered the only hope of fresh drinking water along their journey. Wired to the pump handle was a baking powder can and inside the can was a handwritten note:
'This pump is all right as of June 1932. I put a new sucker washer into it and it ought to last five years. But the washer dries out and the pump has got to be primed. Under the white rock I buried a bottle of water out of the sun, the cork end up. There's enough water in it to prime the pump, but not if you drink some first. Pour about one fourth and let her soak to wet the leather. Then pour in the rest medium fast and pump like crazy. You'll git water. The well has never run dry. Have faith. When you git watered up, fill the bottle and put it back like you found it for the next feller." (signed) Desert Pete. P.S. Don't go drinking up the water first. Prime the pump with it and you'll git all you can hold.'"
I hope to see you this weekend. And I hope you will make plans to devote most Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings with us at UUCF in the coming year. Attending worship is like priming the pump.
Yours,
Mary Katherine 
