How would you finish the sentence, Expectations Are…?

Are expectations good? Are they bad? Does it depend? (And does any of it matter?) The Rev. Tony Larsen recently retired as minister at Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church in Racine. He has written a book entitled Trust Yourself! You Have the Power (Impact Publishers, 1979), authored a Unitarian Universalist Association curriculum called “A Catechism for Unitarian Universalists,” and served on the boards of the Women’s Resource Center, Southeastern Wisconsin AIDS Project, National Alliance on Mental Illness of Racine County, the LGBT Center of SE Wisconsin, and Racine Jail Ministry.

We can use our curiosity as a guiding light in the dark, letting it point us where we need to go in our relationships, our own minds, and out in the world.

Children use curiosity to steer them in their daily lives—what can we learn from that wisdom? How might curiosity be a tool for learning, healing, and even conflict management?

Join us for this Mother’s Day and Child Dedication Sunday in which we will use curiosity as a light.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice, “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!” Our faith is founded on curiosity, and wonder is one of our congregation’s four undergirding values. We use curiosity and wonder as faithful companions in the search for truth and meaning, opening us up like telescopes to new ideas, greater understanding, and more connection with our fellow human beings and the universe.

How do you find the courage to be truly curious in life?

Join us for this New Member Ceremony Sunday in which we explore curiosity as a tool of our faith.

We are interconnected to all beings through air and sun, water and earth. We’ve known this for most of the generations of human experience. Urban life and its typical disconnection from nature is fairly recent.

This Earth Day Sunday, we’ll explore the benefits of finding wholeness in nature and our responsibility to preserve and maintain access to green spaces, both for our health and the wholeness of all beings.

Sometimes our brains work in zeros and ones: I am whole, or I am not whole; this experience is good, or this experience is bad; I am male or I am female. But the truth is sometimes more complicated than that, and involves a journey through unknown territory.

Join us on this Easter Sunday where we complicate binaries along with the most complicated binary story in our culture: I was dead, and now I am risen.

Each of us has broken pieces—places in our life where hurt or loss has made a knot in our wood. Sometimes the bark has grown back around these knots, and sometimes they are still tender where the branch has been lost, and we are exposed.

Knowing that life will create these broken places, how do learn to feel whole again?

Join this service to explore the difference between whole and not whole in lives that include suffering.

Someone once said that being a minister is like being a dog at a whistlers’ convention. I think life is like that for many of us. How do we find a path to wholeness, when so many different demands are calling for attention?

We live in a fragmented, distracted and broken world, yet we yearn for wholeness. Paradoxically, acceptance of not being whole can be a path to wholeness.

Not all of our journeys through life are voluntary. Sometimes you get to pick your journey, other times you get to pick your team.

When you find yourself on a journey not of your own choosing, who do you surround yourself with?

Join us for this service that explores unexpected and uninvited journeys, and how the people who journey with you can help carry you through.

In every hero’s journey, there is tension between the plan and reality, risk and reward. At the outset of a great journey, you know there will be mountains and valleys, mentors and monsters, trials and triumphs. But when we are reading a book or watching a movie, we get to witness the excitement of danger from the safety of our couches.

In real life, we might prefer our journeys to be finite and not too risky, rather than epic adventures. Join us in this service where we explore the epic adventures of real life, when our questions sometimes point us in crooked directions, and risky, uncertain journeys.

What if the obstacles in front of us aren’t in the way of our lives, but instead are our lives? Speed bumps have their reasons. Getting a flat tire on a road trip becomes part of the trip and a story to tell.

Being stuck is not necessarily bad – it’s where the inner journey is most active. If we’re lucky, unexpected waystations appear just in time to shelter us before we move on.