Hello Everyone,

Tim Plett and his family are away on vacation for the next few weeks and so some of us from the community will be taking over the talkie bits while he’s gone. You can look forward to hearing from both Arielle and Judi in the upcoming weeks, and yours truly this Sunday.

Since buying a house about a year and half ago, I’ve become (somewhat reluctantly) a person who takes care of a yard. I won’t call myself a gardener, that honorific would be an exaggeration. Over the course of this spring and summer, a particularly pesky patch of grass has become somewhat of an obsession, and the time I’ve spent outside tending to it has resulted in my reconsideration of Jesus’ parable of the sower, and the harsh way I was taught to understand it in my youth. So this week we’re going to deconstruct that story and put it back together, with some help from Ernest Hemingway, as a way of thinking about how the parable can inform our understanding of privilege, in whatever way we experience it, and how we use it or abuse it to the betterment or detriment of those with whom we share the world.

The aspiring college professor in my wants to assign reading for this week, but instead I will simply recommend that if you have not read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and you’re worried about having the ending spoiled (can you really call it spoiling when a book is seventy years old?), give the book a quick read before Sunday. It’s only a hundred pages long, and is widely available in bookstores, libraries, and other electronic formats. Again, not a requirement.

If you’re still feeling intrigued, join us here, in the Facebook group, on Sunday morning at 10:45.

-Tim (Penner)