MajBritt_letter_2012

Dear Congregants, Members and Friends,

As we look ahead to fulfilling our 20/20 vision as a congregation, I hope that each individual or family in our church will be just as visionary in your giving. The two will, naturally, need to go together: our dreams and our financial giving.

The strategic plan will take incremental steps toward realizing that vision, and we can do the same with our pledges. If you are at your max with your pledge now, then that’s what you can do. And thank you for stretching that much! But if you can put yourself on a three or a five year plan to increase your pledge, expanding your own giving to match our growing vision, that would be ideal.

Sometimes when I’m excited about something, I think I have to get there all at once. It’s kind of in my nature. I want to run, not walk, to my destination. Countless times a day I tell myself, //slow down, one step at a time.// That’s probably my primary spiritual practice, and I will need to practice it the rest of my life. Even when I’m in a wheel chair l’ll likely have the brake pads replaced every couple of months.

In the practice of slowing down I remind myself, often, of something I began to notice after years of paying attention to my discouragements. It is this: I only lose heart when I think I have to do it all, and all at once, and all by myself. Slowing down to notice that has brought me, over time, into a place of fundamental optimism. When I admit I can’t do it all, that life has its own timing, and that I’m not alone, I am heartened.

For me, to work and live in community with people whose vision is to ever expand the “circle of love” is a dream come true. So I plan to fund that dream, one step at a time. I will be increasing my pledge incrementally each year. If you too can do 1, or 5 or 10 or 20% more than you’re doing now, great. If you can’t right now, but can make a plan for the future that’s good too. It says you have hope for you and us.

Unitarian Universalism is a place of optimism and hope. When it comes to pledging, your money is your hope. What hopes do you have for the world? This church is a place which nurtures those hopes, and your footsteps, toward the Good. It is a place which will take your hopes and your gifts of time, talent and money and combine it with the hopes, time, talent and money of others to be a vibrant gift to the world. Whatever you give, of time, talent, love, hope, optimism, compassion, mercy and money, I know you will get back tenfold, just as I have.

Faithfully, Maj-Britt