Every fall my church hosts a pumpkin patch.  Several thousand pumpkins are delivered and placed amid the trees and fountains of the church grounds.  People come from far and wide to search for just the right pumpkin.  Children of all ages are captivated by the awe and wonder of the setting.  It is a time of memories recalled and memories made.  Cameras are ubiquitous and smiles are ear to ear.   I meet friends I have not seen in a while, see children that I first saw when they were born or baptized some years ago.   I watch as people give of their time and energy to help raise funds for important ministries of the church and community.  I watch as some people encounter the church in a new way, some for the first time.  I hope and pray they sense the spirit of thanksgiving and hope that undergirds this special place and time.    I hope and pray that they might come to experience some deeper sense of God’s presence in this place and connect that with the church.  

I must confess that I love the church.  I love church buildings and church architecture.  I love what they represent and the beauty they add to the landscape of life.  I love what they stand for and the divine mystery they represent and the human journey they facilitate.  I came across this meditation by Edmond Browning, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.  It spoke to me in a special way.  He writes,

“When I visit an old church, I often think about what life was like for the people who first built it.  How much hard work it took to build the church.  What a different country they lived in from the one in which we live: a country in which uninhabited areas went on for miles and miles, a country in which people lived lives hard, lonely, and short.  A country in which families lost children often, to diseases for which there was no remedy.  A country in which a man in his fifties was old and so was a woman in her forties. A country in which, at this time of year, everyone who could carry a hayfork was in the fields bringing in the harvest.  We drive by the roadside vegetable stands and see the pumpkins, the squashes, the last tomatoes and beans.  We buy some of these things and decorate our homes with them, hang ears of corn on our doors, buy a couple of bales of straw and arrange them on our front porches with a pot of two of chrysanthemums.  We think they are beautiful.  They looked at those things and thanked God they wouldn’t starve in the winter to come.  And yet they found the energy and wood and trust enough to build God’s house.  Something in them knew that their trust rightly resided in God.  In a time when life was harder and more precarious than our lives are, they found the courage to trust in God”   (A Year of Days with The Book of Common Prayer, October 7).

Though we live in a much different day and age, may we find the courage, amid our awareness of God’s bounty and blessings, to trust.  May this be a season for us all to renew our faith and place our trust in the God from whom all blessings flow.