Dear friends,
Happy New Year! A new year usually brings feelings of hope for new beginnings. But 2022 is starting out in a depressingly familiar way. Once again Covid cases are rising as the omicron variant explodes across the country. As you have no doubt heard or read, medical experts warn that January may be the most difficult month of the pandemic yet.
With that in mind, I have made the difficult decision to move us back to online worship for the month of January, beginning tomorrow. The very idea of doing this is extremely depressing, but it is the right thing to do. This is the way we love our neighbors, by doing all we can to keep one another safe. Hopefully by the end of January the omicron surge will have died down and we can go back to quasi-normal in-person gatherings.
Peace to you all as we enter this third year of Coronatide. The service sheet for tomorrow is attached. Remember you can access the live stream by going to our website, www.stdunstan.net, and clicking on the Live Worship button.
I end with this prayer, passed on to me by my friend Deborah Silver.
God of this new year, God of our ongoing story: we pray for all those who enter this year with anxiety, with exhaustion, with grief. We pray for ourselves. And we pray that this may be a year of restoration: of lives filled with new purpose, and renewed hope, so that instead of praying for something to end, we discover again the joy of beginnings. Amen.