Dear friends,
I’m back! A month and a day from my surgery I feel more than ready to return. The surgery and continuing rehab could not have gone better. I know that’s not always the case. A friend had the same surgery two weeks after mine and has had a horrible time. I am so grateful for the notes and messages, the chauffeuring, the food, and most of all the prayers. I know all of that contributed to my recovery. I won’t name names for fear of leaving someone out. But I want to say a special thanks to Joseph Henry, who was an attentive, caring, and patient nurse. His dad would be proud.
That said, I know there is still a good bit of healing to do. I am still going to physical therapy two or three times a week. My left knee and leg are still swollen and a little bruised. Even though I feel great I know (because my doctor has stressed it) that I need to pace myself. So I’m easing back into work. This week I plan to be here for a few hours a day, and of course, be here for the service. I look forward to seeing everyone.
Recently our outgoing outreach chair, Suzanne Johnson, wrote about our relationship with the Msalata Theological School in Tanzania. For many years we have sent money for them to use to help with medical costs for students and their families. This year we sent $6,000. In response I received this note from Sandy McCann, an Episcopal priest who spent many years as a missionary there.
Dear Tricia,
When I saw the note just now from our treasurer that St Dunstan’s had sent another gift of $6,000.00, I burst into song:
Great is thy faithfulness,
Great is thy faithfulness,
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed thy hand hast provided;
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me.It fits perfectly–we have not had a church as faithful as St Dunstan’s.
From the depths of my heart, thank you and the good people of St Dunstan’s.
Sandy
That is just one example of St. Dunstan’s generosity. While I was gone the vestry voted to give $3,000 to the Solidarity Sandy Springs food pantry, which sees increased needs in the summer month. They also agreed to sponsor two children in the Peoplestown area (not far from the old Fulton County Stadium) to attend Freedom School, sponsored by Emmaus House. This program helps children who need to improve their reading skills, and insures that the kids do not lose ground in the summer months. Finally, the vestry approved the purchase of sewing machines and sewing kits for the seven girls who will graduate from the Dignity Sewing School, a project co-sponsored by the Diocese of Cape Coast in Ghana, and the Diocese of Atlanta. Girls come to live in a dorm on diocesan property and study sewing, along with some other things, for two years. The director has long hoped to provide the girls with sewing machines and sewing kits when they graduate, but the funds have not been there. I am so delighted that the vestry said an immediate yes when I asked them to consider taking up this role. The total cost for the machine and sewing kit is $180. I hope that we will continue in this partnership into the future.
Finally, I want to leave you with an essay by former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger that I found very moving. It will boost your spirits.
With love,Tricia
Rep. Adam Kinzinger
Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.
We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.
Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.
For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.
The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.
What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can’t stop thinking about.
It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.
They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.
The welcome only got bigger from there.
The University of Kansas, the state’s flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria’s national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.
These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country’s song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren’t sure what to do with themselves.
Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.
But it’s not just Lawrence.
This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.
The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team’s red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.
There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.
And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country’s national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don’t know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.
That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else’s song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.
That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.