It really does take a village to run an Annual Budget Drive. Thank you to Co-Chairs Brian Gill, Elisabeth Greer, and Julia Huston for creating a fun, informative and hopeful Budget Drive. If you haven’t yet, I hope you all will spend some time with the giving guide they mailed out to you in late February. It is both edifying and aspirational.

Thank you also to Susanne Greelish, Stephanie Kendall, Saul Lookner, Aimee Lambert, Ron Margolin, Julia Wolfe and their entire crew who brought back the Fellowship Dinner with style. Thank you to everyone who were on the set-up/clean-up crews and those who cooked the delicious dinner we all enjoyed — especially Jeremy Lew and Devon Welles who ran the smoker. And you all thought it was catered by Blue Ribbon Barbeque – didn’t you?

Thank you to each and every one of you for all that you give of your time, talent and treasure so that FUUSN can continue to be the amazing village that it is.

Decades ago, Reverend John Wolf, then Senior Minister at our UU congregation in Tulsa, Oklahoma wrote the following about why supporting communities like FUUSN is so important. Although, it was written in a different time and setting, there is so much that still applies.

“There is only one reason for joining a UU congregation! That is to support it. Because it points to what’s noblest and best in human life.

“You want to support a UU congregation because it has a free pulpit. Because you can hear ideas expressed there which would cost any other minister his or her job. You want to support it because it is a place where children can learn that religion is for joy, comfort, for gratitude and love.

“You want to support it because it is a place where walls between people are torn down rather than built up. Because it is a place for the religious displaced persons of our time, the refugees from mixed marriages, the unwanted freethinkers and those who insist against orthodoxy that they must work out their own beliefs.

“You want to support a Unitarian Universalist congregation because it is more concerned with human beings than with dogmas. Because it searches for the holy, rather than dwells upon the depraved. Because it calls no one a sinner, yet knows how deep is the struggle and how great is the hunger for what is good. You want to support a Unitarian Universalist congregation because it can laugh…because it insults neither your intelligence nor your conscience, and because it calls you to worship what is truly worthy of your sacrifice…”

I am honored to be a part of this community, a community so infused with enthusiasm, openness, good heartedness, and a generosity of spirit. The FUUSN we create together is where isolation becomes community where we have a chance to join our lives — our hopes — our fears — our joys — our sorrows — all parts of us together so that we may feel the strength, the care and the support of many.