General

Oh wow!  Thank you for such a wonderful welcome back from my sabbatical!  Everything was just right.  From the “Welcome Back” message on the church sign, to the flowers sent anonymously, to the smiles and hugs, to the exuberant worship services.  And the church building itself!  My, you all worked so hard.  Everything is gleaming and shining and amazing!

It feels good to return to life in Eureka and at Eureka Christian Church.  Of course, part of me will probably long for the Camino for the rest of my life.  Such is the power of the experience; I think it never fully lets you go.  But I can say that it is nice to have a rhythm for my days again, and it is even better to get reconnected with you!  It is good to be back.

However, I do not come back the same.  I thought the Camino might change me.  I hoped it would.  I mean, seriously, you don’t want to walk 500 miles for nothing!  I suspect that I’ll keep discovering my post-Camino changes as life unfolds from Santiago on, but I am already aware of a few.

*I feel really strong.  (And more than just my leg muscles!)  I feel like I have claimed an internal power I’ve only tentatively danced around before.  I don’t know what that power will enable me to do, and I sure hope this feeling doesn’t go away, but for now I am aware of it more than I’ve ever been aware of it before.  And because of that,

*I have changed some old patterns of behavior.  Certainly that old, awful tape from childhood—“you’re not good enough; you’ll never be good enough.”  That’s not really new.  I’ve been successfully silencing that message for some time now.  But there are others.  Obsessive worries and irrational insecurities.  Lately when I’ve felt those rising, I have been able to say to myself, “You know what, Jennie.  You don’t have to be that way anymore.  You have the power to change your response.”  And I have.  Rather than spiraling down into those ridiculous pits, I’ve been able to say to myself, “Stop.  Be this way instead.”  I don’t know why I wasn’t able to do that before.  It really isn’t all that hard.  I think I just had to learn that I do have power and I can be stronger.

I am glad to be back among you, but I’m not really “back.”  I am instead a new creation, ready to see what God has in mind for me next.

I have good news to share.  Really good news.  Because of our faithful giving for the 2016 church budget—and because of God’s providential miracle working—we are pleased to announce the call of our new part-time Minister of Christian Education.  At a called meeting on December 20, the Board approved a unanimous recommendation from the Personnel Committee to bring Rev. Amy Johnson onto our church staff!  She will begin in early January.

Amy comes to us most recently from Central Christian Church in Decatur.  For fourteen years, she served as the Associate Minister at Mackinaw Christian Church where she developed the premier youth program in the Illinois and Wisconsin Region.  Mackinaw consistently sent the most children and youth to church camp and to events like Summit due to Amy’s enthusiasm, organization, and motivational skills.  In fact, Eureka Christian Church sent the most youth to Summit in November, due entirely to Amy’s encouragement.

Amy has many great gifts, but I’d like to highlight three of them.  The first is her passion.  It fills her so completely that it just spills out all over the rest of us.  She ignites any room she is in.  She also knows how to call forth gifts in others.  Amy sees with an intuitive vision.  She has a remarkable way of helping children, youth, and adults become all that God intends for us to be.  In ministry circles, we talk a lot about equipping the saints; Amy knows how to do that.  But the thing I admire most about Amy is how she is able to develop programs that do not rely on her energy, vision, or presence to thrive.  Her work is never Amy-centered; it is Spirit-centered.  It is a great benefit and blessing to the churches she serves.

I am so excited about our future with Amy on our staff.  Truthfully folks, I think we are going to be unstoppable.  Get ready Eureka Christian Church, a new day is coming!  And it’s going to be great!

And she gave birth to her firstborn son,
wrapped him in bands of cloth,
and laid him in a manger
because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7

My friends, we are famous.  I know I shouldn’t brag, but it’s a really great story.  One you should know.  On Thanksgiving night, after the turkey, pie, and disappointing football games, I checked my work email.  I know, I know.  I shouldn’t have given in to the temptation to “work” on a holiday.  But I am so glad I did because in my inbox was a marvelous message from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Wessel.  He is the director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a frequent columnist for the Wall Street Journal where he worked for 30 years.  He also has a soft spot for Eureka Christian Church.  He and I exchanged emails last year when his mother passed away, so I already knew the connection.

You see, his mother and her family lived in Eureka when she was a teenager.  I’ll let him tell the rest:

Seventy five years ago, a German Jewish teenager, who had been sent to safety in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport, arrived in New York where she was reunited with her parents.  After a brief stay in New York, the three of them travelled across the U.S. by bus to Scattergood, Iowa, where the American Friends Service Committee had turned a school into a hostel for European refugees.

As the Nazi terror spread through Europe, the members of a Disciples of Christ Church in Eureka, Ill, decided to go beyond reading newspaper headlines and prayer.  A delegation from the church drove to Scattergood, interviewed the teenage girl’s parents and offered them a new home in Eureka. And so the family moved into a fully furnished apartment and was welcomed into a community that had rarely known Jews, let along German-born Jews.  The father got a job auditing municipal books in small Illinois towns.  The mother got a job in the Eureka College kitchen.  And the teenager got a free college education there.  That teenager was our mother, Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel, who died last year at the age of 88.  We grew up hearing stories from our grandmother and our mother about the end of their peaceful, pleasant life in Germany and the beginning of a new and prosperous life in the U.S.

Irm Wessel moved to New Haven in the 1950s, practiced clinical social work for four decades and, with our father, pediatrician Morris Wessel, raised four children in New Haven.  When she visited the Eureka church several years ago, she reminded the good people of the Eureka Christian Church of the generosity of their parents and grandparents and she made a forceful plea for immigration reform.  She never forgot the fear and desperation of being a refugee and a new immigrant, and was a lifelong advocate for those who came to America after she did.

Whenever David Wessel tells the story of his family’s new life in America, he mentions us.  The passage above was included in a presentation he made at an awards ceremony for the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, Connecticut.  The Thanksgiving email was to let me know that he also mentioned us in an interview for the Philadelphia Inquirer in a story that ran on November 27.

If we’re going to be famous, I’m glad it is for this reason.  Hospitality is a core Christian discipline; it is vital to our faith.  May we continue to burn with an undying commitment to welcome the stranger in our midst.  For in so doing, as we ought to know, we also welcome the Christ.