Reflections

Reflections During the Watermelon Carnival Nativity will be offering a place for rest and refreshment just outside her unique red doors. Under a tent, lemonade will be offered for free and the air conditioned church will be available for hot and weary Carnival goers. It will be a wonderfully iconic gift to this community-“Come unto me all who are weary and heavy laden (and hot as Hades!), and I will give you rest”, said Jesus. Well, he didn’t say the Hades part, but then, again, he didn’t live in Mississippi in August. If you are willing to spend an hour as a host of this cooling and calming space, please contact James McCormick. I would like to remind you of another very special part of Nativity. A couple of years ago Kirk LaFond initiated what he called the Bible Slam at Nativity. Most of you know the drill: Come into the church, go to the lectern where the large Bible will be opened to the last page where someone last read. There will be a post-it note at the verse where the next reader begins. Read aloud(preferably) for as long as you like, place the post-it note where you ended and sign your name and date. I’d like to suggest that you also take a minute or two to sit in the stillness of the church after you have read. If the passage is difficult, disturbing or confusing, don’t think that you have to squeeze some sort of meaning out of it. Just sit, and do what I like to call ‘marinate’ in the scripture. It will find its way into your soul in its own time. Finally, as I dropped by the North Mississippi Herald on Wednesday for a lunch date with David Howell, he surprised me by handing me a copy of the original Nativity Church parish register, dating from the construction of the first church building in the 1880s. It was given to him by a person who is no longer associated with Nativity. I have only begun to explore its contents, but along with the records of services, baptism and funeral records, there is also Bishop Green’s dedication of the second church in 1922, deeds to the property and an detailed handwritten estimate of the costs to build the first church. It is a treasure trove of information, that will ultimately be placed in the Diocesan Archives in Jackson. We’ll be learning a great deal from it until it makes its way to the Archives. See you Sunday! Peace, Duncan