One of the most difficult things about this pandemic is the changing nature of what we know about COVID-19 and the best methods to protect ourselves and our community from the virus. As scientific understanding grows, vaccinations increase, and best practices are developed, reopening plans must change. Puyallup UMC’s Reopening Team does their best to stay abreast to these constant revisions.

Last week, our Reopening Team met to discuss some recent changes as well as best practices for reopening. In our conversation, we made the following recommendations and changes to our plans.

In 2018, my parents and I attended the Seattle Flower & Garden Show. I fell in love with a display of beautiful lemon plants and believed the seller’s claims that lemon plants can grow outside in our climate and no, it wasn’t that difficult to take care of them. As a novice gardener, you can guess where this story is going!

As Pastor Cara preached in this week’s sermon, one of the blessings of our creation story found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a is the idea of sacred time. Evening and morning set boundaries to our days, and the seventh day creates a boundary in our week. This final day of the week is set aside for holy rest, which we call Sabbath. My favorite part of this story is that on the seventh day, even God rests.

When our church mailed out star words in January for Epiphany, my family received the word “friendship” in the mail. For all of us, friendships have been one of the life savers of the pandemic. My husband, Tom, meets his college friends every Thursday for “virtual happy hour” on zoom in our living room. My daughter’s friends came by our home to drop off presents on her birthday early in the pandemic, extending love and care during a lonely time. My son’s friends often met for late night group phone calls. Through texts and emails, phone calls and the occasional meet up in-person, friends provide some of the bright spots of my Covid life as well.

After a disrupted and chaotic end to the 2019/2020 school year and an online and hybrid year for 2020/2021, children and youth are headed back to school again. This year, some aspects felt refreshingly normal – Anna and I went to Fife High School in-person to pay back-to-school fees. We made the annual trip to Target to buy school supplies. We’ve shopped for a few things Jonathan will need at college and plan to move him into his dorm at the University of Washington in mid-September.

At a graduation celebration this past weekend, a woman mentioned that she had been in the mood for ice cream Saturday afternoon and headed to the Puyallup Baskin Robbins with her family. On the way, they saw the huge column of black smoke from the Puyallup cold storage fire and soon realized that the roads to Baskin Robbins were closed and the area had been evacuated. Another friend commented, “Does it feel like things are just piling on at this point?”

This week I read a blog by Amory Peck, the former lay leader for the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church. Peck describes some of the lessons we learn from reading fiction. She says “often the author, through her characters, says just what I need to read, or gives me just the words I want to say.” I find this to be true as well, although this week, it didn’t come from a book of fiction, but rather another blog post.

Back in June, I thought Pastor Cara and I had written our last mid-week pastoral reflection. While these pastoral reflections helped us share with you throughout the long months of the pandemic, we needed to change our focus to planning in-person gatherings and a safe start to worship. We looked forward to the next stage of reopening with anticipation and some relief, feeling like we were in the final stretch of the Covid roller coaster and might even be able to get off this ride altogether!