I met with six of the missional EPs this week for check in and networking. The word that perhaps best sums up our mutual experience of our beloved denomination is "chaos." Every one of our 173 presbyteries is experiencing severe financial challenges. Everyone is being called to a place of deep, adaptive change. To say that we live in challenging times is an understatement at best. Yet, that does not mean that chaos needs to rule our lives. So often, we forget that God offers us peace in all circumstances. We forget that peace is born, not of outer circumstances but rather of the heart.

Poet Gunilla Norris speaks to this in her reflection on "Peace" from her book Sharing Silence:

                Peace is not the absence of strife.

                Peace is acceptance and surrender

                                to that which is.

                Peace is the profound awareness of the one true source

                                from which all things emerge...

                                and to which all things return.

                However lost we may feel,

                we are never outside of the Source.

                We are intimately known by God,

                sustained by God, and returned to God--

                                daily... now... and when we pass away.

                The Source delights in us,

                                becomes in us, plays in us.

                When we contact the Source,

                our practice has led us to the end and to the beginning.

                Then we can be at peace--

                for no matter what occurs in our lives,

                we can always find our way home to the core,

                the truth of our being.

May the peace of God rule in your heart in this chaotic, topsy-turvy time!

With love in Christ,

Debbie Rundlett, General Presbyter