Over the past few days, I have really enjoyed the clearing skies and the warming weather. Our garden is starting to grow with some of the seeds we could sow right into the cold, moist earth, and some of the more tender seeds that we are starting indoors are beginning to grow tall and strong. At the same time, it has still been cold enough at night over the past week that the little purple basil seedling didn’t survive the chilly night wind, and the sweet basil, thyme, and cilantro were slightly cold-burned. We have to ease our way into this new growing season, checking our progress, and retreating back into shelter if we’ve moved too fast.We also spent this past week venturing into Phase One of Governor Raimondo’s Reopening Rhode Island plan. In Phase One, we’re just dipping our toes in, and Governor Raimondo tells us that we’ll check our progress — see how we’re doing — and retreat back into shelter if we’ve moved too fast. We’ve all given up so much to “flatten the curve,” as we’ve learned to say, of our COVID transmission and hospitalization rates. It would be a waste of our good efforts to move too fast out of our quarantines and risk renewed outbreaks of infection.
As we gradually move toward being able to have a worship team of five live streaming from the church, we have worked this week on our technology to get ready. We increased our WiFi signal strength and are taking steps to make sure that it relays reliably inside the church. This helps us to ease in to some of the safety measures we will need to follow once we are able to worship in the church again.
On Sunday, we will welcome back Susan Lukens, my good friend from St. George’s College in Jerusalem, as our guest preacher. We are so fortunate to have the technological flexibility while we’re sheltering in place to travel virtually to hear Susan in Alexandria, Virginia. I leave you with this beautiful anthem from Sunday’s Gospel: “If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments,” set to the Tallis Canon. https://www.facebook.com/244688192281183/posts/3021276941288947/