Rachel Fitch
Sid & Cathy Batts Pastoral Resident
Eat together. Pray together. Celebrate together.
This is the motto of the place where I had the privilege to live the past 3 years in seminary. A place of folks of all different abilities, doing life together. We were seminary students and friends living with disabilities – friendship and belonging in Christ were at the core.
There were 16 of us, 12 seminary students and 4 friend residents and I can assure you there was a lot of laughter. And, there were hard conversations and growth and learning from each other’s and our own strengths and weaknesses, beginning to see the beauty of life lived in community, the beauty of the body of Christ, each called to different places and each with different gifts, called as the one body.
As the motto names, celebrations were part of the core of our life together. As much laughter as there was, there were also a lot of birthday cakes! We celebrated all sorts of things. Anniversaries for work and volunteer jobs, ends of semesters, new students coming in and others graduating. To give you a picture, my roommate and I made a birthday sign, and, while we took it down once, we quickly had to put it up again, so we simply left it up all year – always ready to celebrate whoever’s birthday might be next!
These times of celebrations and gatherings feel quite distant in weeks like these. And, yet, as a community and church body, we have the gift of walking alongside one another — amidst the hard times and in the joyous. We have the gift of mourning together and celebrating together. It has been a gift to walk with you all these past months, and I look forward to continuing to walk with you all — in the sorrow and joy and all in between. I look forward to continuing to hear about and see the Spirit’s presence in our midst.
I am nearing the final step of the process of becoming a Presbyterian minister and am beginning to plan my ordination service, set for February 13 at 3 pm. While I am planning, I have the gift of thinking about how we celebrate, how we mark moments in our lives and how we take the time to do this. Now, we don’t really know what things will look like come February 13, but I look forward to marking the time and this step in some way through worship.
And, I continue to look forward in hope to the celebrations that we will have as a church body and the continuous celebration we, as Christians, participate in at the table, breaking bread and pouring wine, remembering our Savior and the one body we are called to be.
