Minister’s Column

Today I resurrected the wayside pulpit at the Fellowship building. Actually it wasn’t dead, but let’s say it had been sleeping for a long time. The wayside pulpit is a sign on the corner of the Fellowship’s property, about 6 feet high and 3 feet wide, with the classic black background and individual white plastic letters that spell out messages both informational and inspirational. To operate this sign requires a key to open the glass door, and then comes the fun part: removing old letters and bringing them inside; finding the new letters to spell out this week’s message, and placing them onto the board one at a time. The white plastic letters have little plastic tabs on the back that stick into the slots on the board – which are very fragile to begin with, and they get more brittle from being exposed to the sunlight for long periods of time. Like a two-year pandemic.

During the COVID pandemic the use of this wayside pulpit was one thing that got discontinued. At some point the sign announced:
​
SUNDAY SERVICES
ON ZOOM
ALL ARE WELCOME

but I certainly didn’t announce when we came back to being in person, when we went on Zoom again, and other variations in our COVID rules in the past two years. So the message was not inaccurate, but way out of date–and a couple of letters had fallen down completely. On the other side of the wayside pulpit, many months ago I pinned up a full-color poster with the message “masks save lives.” For a while now I’ve been wanting to change the sign but had not made it a priority until today.
There is an art form to communicating via the wayside pulpit. It’s a bit like a haiku: you have to really economize on the words and syllables that you use. And if you are announcing events and other information, it doesn’t leave much room for pithy inspirational messages – especially when the name

UNITARIAN
UNIVERSALIST
FELLOWSHIP OF
CENTRAL MICHIGAN

takes up half of one side of the sign. In this religion, running out of U’s in the letter box is also a danger.
Every week I write this column, speaking of being pithy and inspirational, and I have about one printed page to say what I want to say. That’s maybe 400-500 words, or 2,000-3,000 characters. On the wayside pulpit, counting both sides, there is room for perhaps 200 of those fragile white plastic letters to be deployed.
The message I settled on today was:

MAY INFINITE
LOVE
BLESS YOU
LIKE THE SUNSHINE
AND THE RAIN

I was just attaching the last letters of the word SUNSHINE when someone passing by on the sidewalk saw what I was doing and said, “Are you the pastor here?” which led to a nice conversation with a person who might be interested in attending our Sunday worship and/or our Buddhist sangha. They were definitely interested in talking about religion, so much so that I had to come back later for AND THE RAIN. Which is another good reason for me to spend an hour once per week wrestling with the little key, and the glass door, and the fragile white plastic letters, and the delightful challenge of saying something meaningful in 11 words or less.

PRAYER:
May we keep finding ways to transmit our messages of love and hope. 
May those messages reach the eyes and ears of the people who most need to receive them.
​Blessed be.

Rev. Andrew Frantz