 Dear St. Paul,
On this Christmas Eve, I want to say something that doesn’t always get said out loud enough: Thank you. I carry a deep, steady gratitude for you—not in some abstract idea of a church, but you as people. For the way you show up. For the way you notice one another. For the way you practice being community in quiet, consistent ways. I talk to a lot of people in the course of a regular pastoral week, and over and over again, I hear folks talk about their longing for beloved community. They name how rare it feels. How fragile. How easily it slips through our fingers. And every time I hear that, I think: If only I could bottle what happens here and share it with the people who may never cross our threshold. People who stay away for reasons that are complicated and tender and very real. People who have been hurt by the Church, ignored by the Church, exhausted by the Church, or convinced there’s no place for them anymore. Because here’s what I see, week after week: I see a community that knows how to weep together. When one of us is grieving, the room shifts. You feel it. You lean in. You make space. No one rushes anyone past their pain. I see a community that knows how to celebrate together. When one of us is joyful, the joy multiplies. It spreads. It becomes shared joy—loud or quiet, depending on the moment. I see people scanning the room—not for who’s missing or what’s lacking—but for familiar eyes. Eyes that say, I know this road. Eyes that say, You’re not alone. Eyes that say, I’ve been there too. It is one of the most tangible ways I know that God is with us. Not just in this season of candles and carols and holy nights. But in all the seasons. The hard ones. The ordinary ones. The ones we didn’t choose AND the ones we can’t get enough of. So often, I think, we’re tempted to believe that church should look louder or bigger than it does here. But this community has made thoughtful, intentional choices about who we are and how we gather. We’ve never been trying to be everything to everybody. We’ve been trying to be a place where people can belong and be known. What we have here is not accidental. It’s not flashy. And it is not small. We have trust. We have people who know one another’s stories and keep showing up. We have room for joy and despair to sit right next to each other. We have a love that doesn’t require pretending everything is fine. That is holy. Tonight, as we gather to tell the story again—of God choosing nearness over distance, presence over power, love over spectacle—I want you to hear this clearly: You are already living that story. Every time you show up for one another in the real, unspectacular, faithful ways you do, you embody Emmanuel—God with us. So, this is my Christmas gratitude. This is my Christmas hope. This is my grown-up Christmas wish: That you see yourselves the way I see you. That you know what a gift you are to one another–and to me. And that you trust—deep in your bones—that what we have here matters more than we sometimes dare to believe. As we step into that circle of candlelight at this evening’s service, and sing Silent Night, Holy Night, that’s what I’ll be thinking about. That’s what will be filling my heart and making my spirit light—the people of St. Paul, holding one another in the glow of that small, stubborn light...the way we always have...the way we always will. With more love and gratitude than one letter can hold, Pr. Melissa  We tend to think of plagues as singular events—diseases that sweep through, peak, and then pass. But history tells a more complicated story. Some plagues don’t arrive all at once. Some linger. Some take many forms at the same time.
This season feels like that. Extreme weather is ripping through our globe. Violence is erupting without warning–A Hanukkah celebration on a beach in Australia, shattered by gunfire. A shooting at Brown University. Two National Guard members from Iowa killed in Syria. A family torn apart when Rob Reiner and his wife were reportedly killed in their home, likely by their own son. Not to mention the political maneuvering that thrives on outrage and fear. And family holiday gatherings where long-buried tensions surface with startling clarity. At times it can feel as though the volume of life on planet Earth has been turned up too high–bringing us all to our knees as we grab for our ears to shield them from the pain that comes from all the excessive noise. In a very real way, we are living in a kind of plague: A plague of extremes. One would think that in the face of it all, the question circling our synapses would be How do we fix this? And for some of us, that's true. But for many of us, a different question is emerging: How do we survive these extremes without losing ourselves? Our faith has always been more honest about this than we give it credit for. In fact, contrary to popular belief, scripture is not the story of people who avoided plagues—either literal or metaphorical. It is the story of people who learned how to live through them. The Israelites wandering in the wilderness did not receive certainty; they received daily bread. The prophets did not offer escape routes; they told the truth and stayed where they were. The psalms did not sanitize despair; they gave it language. Jesus did not bypass suffering; he moved directly into it, choosing presence over self-preservation. In other words, faith, at its best, has never promised immunity from chaos. It has promised orientation, companionship, and meaning in the middle of it. Richard Rohr writes often about the danger of extremes—how they offer the illusion of clarity while stripping us of wisdom. Extremes promise certainty without humility, belonging without responsibility, answers without depth. But faith, he insists, teaches us how to live in the middle space—the place where complexity is honored, paradox is held, and transformation actually becomes possible. To be sure, wisdom does not live at the edges. It lives in restraint. In patience. And in the refusal to let fear do our thinking for us. To survive a plague of extremes, then, is to practice what faith has always taught in hard seasons: Remaining in the middle space when everything is pulling us toward the edges. It is to resist reaction when all that surrounds us is demanding that we react. That might look like refusing the demand to have a hot take on every headline. It might mean setting boundaries around conversations that strip people of dignity. It might mean entering family gatherings with curiosity instead of armor—or leaving earlier than planned because self-preservation is also holy. It certainly means remembering that we are not the first generation to live through upheaval—and that survival has never depended on being the loudest or the most certain, but the most grounded. Faith helps us survive plagues by slowing us down. By reminding us that love is not an emotion, but a practice. And by teaching us to breathe deeply when the world is absolutely hyperventilating reactivity and fear. We are living in a season where extremes are exposed—sometimes painfully so. But exposure is not the same thing as defeat. After all, nothing can be tended until it is first revealed. Nothing can be navigated until it is named. Nothing that feels unbearable can be carried until it is first acknowledged. Survival, in the end, is not about conquering the plague. It is about learning how to live with depth and restraint when the world keeps demanding extremes. So this week, notice where the volume has been turned up in your own life. Notice what is pulling you toward reaction, certainty, or some other extreme. And then see how this long tradition of faith through which you are walking might be offering you another way. A way that is slower. A way that is steadier. A way that is more grounded—right here in the middle of it all. On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa  When I was younger, Whitney Houston sang, "I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride, to make it easier. Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be." (Be honest—some of you just sang that in your head. I know I did while typing it.)
These opening lines to that old song keep popping up in my head as we move toward our first child-centered worship service and Inter-generational Craft Fellowship after worship here at St. Paul this weekend. I haven’t thought of that song for years, but maybe it’s popping up now because those words still ring true for us today. If we’re being honest, here at St. Paul we don’t have a bustling children’s wing or rows of young families on Sunday mornings. We have a handful of families with children of various ages who faithfully show up among us and with us, and for whom we are grateful. We have also loved children who, as they’ve grown, discovered spiritual nourishment in other communities, and the connections we shared with them remain part of our story. To be sure, children have been and continue to be an important part of our life together at St. Paul, and the relationships we’ve built with them have formed this community as deeply as they’ve formed the children themselves. In other words, whether they’re here every week or here when life allows, children matter to this community in ways that have nothing to do with numbers. Their presence shapes us. Their voices carry a kind of truth adults rarely speak out loud. Their questions—about God, about life, about relationships, about who belongs—pull us back to what’s essential in our faith and in our shared life. And the relationships we build across generations—quietly, consistently, without fanfare—have become one of the most beautiful markers of who we are. Without a doubt, the presence of these young people among us matters a great deal because their voices and their questions and their wonder shape us. But it also comes with a great responsibility on our part. We have things to offer our young people, truths we hold, a way of being Christian they won’t encounter in most other places in our area. And it is our job and our joy to teach them these lessons that they won’t get anywhere else. We are responsible for and rewarded with the gift of teaching them:
Lessons like these are rare in the church landscape most of our kids are swimming in, which is exactly why they matter. And what they receive from us and what we receive from them as these lessons are imparted is mutual. It’s shared formation. It’s how a community like ours grows up together, no matter our ages. This is why inter-generational relationships matter. Not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they shape us. They show us who we are. They remind us that faith isn’t an individual sport or something we “graduate” from. It’s shared life. Shared stories. Shared courage. So this Sunday, when the kids lead us in worship, remember: They’re not performing for us. They’re revealing something about God—about honesty, joy, presence, and the kind of community Jesus keeps trying to build in spite of us and, sometimes, through us. Will everything go smoothly? Probably not. But honestly, even when we adults are running the show, perfection is NEVER the goal. The goal has always been about real people, showing up in real and honest ways, to worship and get to know a real, loving, God better. I hope you’ll make plans to join us this Sunday for a very special worship service and our craft fellowship time afterward—making Christmas cards for home-bound members, sharing stories, and building relationships across generations. And who knows? Somewhere in the middle of everything this Sunday brings—the wonder, the chaos, the delight—the laughter of our children might just remind us how we used to be. And maybe, if we let it, how we could be again. On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa  Before the snow flew this past weekend, we had done our best to clean up the leaves in our yard—twice. We raked them up and then mulched them in the mower, so that they could be redistributed to our garden beds to feed the soil and insulate our overwintered garlic. Our yard was looking pretty okay after all of that work–that is, until the wind shifted, and howled, and even whistled some, and suddenly the west side of our house became the final resting place for a number of the neighborhood’s leaves.
That morning I opened the door and peaked around the corner of our house only to find an ankle-deep reminder that you can do everything ‘“right” and still end up holding what isn’t yours to hold — whether it’s leaves blown in overnight or snow pushed in by a plow during a storm you didn’t ask for. I’ll be honest and say that my first reaction to what I saw wasn’t exactly a hymn of praise. It was something like, “Oh come on!”--just, perhaps, with a little bit more flare. So there I was, standing alone–with no neighbor to glare at. No tool in the garage that could stop the wind. Just reality—showing up uninvited, like it always does. Instead of pretending it didn’t bother me, I made the conscious decision to just let the moment be what it was—annoying, inconvenient, and completely out of my hands. Fr. Richard Rohr writes, “What we do not transform, we transmit.” In other words, sometimes the first step toward transformation is choosing not to hand our irritation or our reaction to something to the next person—or turn it inward on ourselves, as if we should have been calmer or wiser or more Zen about a pile of leaves or some plowed snow straight out of the gate. Rohr calls this kind of pause “radical allowing”—letting a moment be what it is before we decide what to do with it. This time of year has a way of piling things at our door. Family dynamics we didn’t choose. Grief that returns on a schedule we don’t get to set. The pressure to be joyful on command. Not to mention that low-grade exhaustion that starts in November and extends well into the new year. We’re told to manage it, fix it, push through, smile harder. But nature often preaches something quieter: Things fall. Not because we failed—but because every season has a letting-go built into it. Radical allowing isn’t surrender or approval. Radical allowing simply means letting a moment be what it is before you decide what to do with it. It’s the gentle pause that keeps us from disappearing into overwhelm, so we can choose our response instead of getting swept away by it. The surprising thing is what happens after the allowing—not during it. Once I quit arguing with the leaves or the wind, or “having words” with imaginary neighbors in my head, I could actually choose what to do next. Rake now? Wait until the weekend? Shovel again now? Pretend the leaves are compost where I didn’t ask for compost? Let it be springtime’s problem? Suddenly I had options instead of agitation. Presence instead of panic. So if something unwanted shows up this week—iced over leaves, snow piles pushed in at the end of the driveway, emotions, circumstances—whatever–I want you to have a way of trying “radical allowance” in your own life. Here’s a simple practice for when what you didn’t choose shows up anyway:
On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa |
Pastor Melissa enjoying time on her hammock.
Rev. Melissa Sternhagen
Rev. Melissa Sternhagen was called as the pastor of St. Paul Congregational UCC in June of 2020. Prior to her call to St. Paul, Pr. Melissa worked as a hospice chaplain in the Ames, IA area, following pastorates at rural churches in Central Iowa and Southern Illinois. Pr. Melissa is a second-career pastor with a background in agribusiness and production & supply operations. She received her M.Div. from Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO, and holds a MA Ed. in Adult Education and Training, and a BA in Organizational Communications. Archives
January 2026
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