Helpers of all ages needed to help decorate for Advent! 

Saturday 11/30, 9:30-11ish

Contact Sue Goodspeed with questions: [email protected]

Friends of OSCS:

The renovation and expansion of our Emergency Shelter at 2219 Chicago Avenue is quickly approaching!

As of today, we expect that our Emergency Shelter guests, staff, and volunteers will be moving temporarily to 2545 Portland Avenue in mid-December. This temporary site is about half a mile from our current location. It will be a great temporary fit for guests, volunteers, and staff for about 6 to 8 months before we return to our larger building next year!
This project has been and will be a significant lift for our organization. Your partnership is key! Here are 5 ways you can help ensure a smooth transition for everyone:

• Help us pack up the shelter and unpack on the other side! If you love organizing, playing Tetris with boxes, and carrying moderately heavy things, be a Packing Partner! Packing is underway now, running through mid-December.
• Support guests at the temporary location by serving as a Welcome Host. This new role will greet arriving guests, host activities, support meal service, and spend time interacting with guests. This role involves a little bit of everything and will be an essential part of our guests’ experience this winter!
• Shop for good! We are looking for donations of specific bedding and cleaning supplies for the new space. Find what we’re looking for on the Our Saviour’s Housing Amazon Wishlist, or please contact Wateen at [email protected] for more information. As new needs arise, we will continue to add them to the wish list.
• Provide or sponsor a meal this winter. Our guests love your meals more than anything. Please consider signing up to provide and serve a meal at the temporary site or sponsoring the costs of a meal for $250 or more!
• Give! Give to the Max Day (Thursday, Nov. 21) offers one important way you can help. We also need your increased and sustained support to be able operate a larger shelter next year.

Please visit https://oscs-mn.org/osh-volunteer-opportunities/ for more information, or contact [email protected] to learn how you or your group can expand your impact! ​

Learn More & Apply

Music has been on our minds!  

​And why not?

• Singing integrates mind, heart and body, is a natural mood-booster, and syncs us up with community.
• Music is a visceral connection to the past - it can bring back emotions and experiences from particular moments in our past, and in that way minister to us again in the present. The Israelites sang songs of God's past deliverance to face difficult circumstances.
• Music can also be a prophetic reminder of what is to come, and ground us in God's reality that is greater than what we can see.

In the past two weeks, these things have been said to me:
"I need to sing, it gets me through tough times!"
"I wish I knew more of the songs we sing in church."
"When we sang songs from the pandemic it brought back how grounded I felt then and I found myself returning to that place within."
 
SO!
1- We are creating a collection of LNPC favorites to be sure we draw from them regularly. 
2-  And start coming early if you want to sing more - we'll be doing a pre-service singalong at 9:45 every Sunday!
3- And don't forget the LNPC Playlists! Many of the songs we sing are here. But also these are great driving/ background sound / devotional / remembering-what's-real things to listen to

PLEASE SHARE YOUR FIVE FAVORITE THINGS TO SING IN CHURCH: 

David Wood, a retired pastor and co-director of the Resonance grant that Pastor Kara, Mike Woods and 21 other church leaders have been in for three years, shared this message with the group the weekend before the election for All Saints Sunday: 

Whenever I contemplate the meaning of Christian hope, I find myself returning to one of my favorite theologians, Nicholas Lash.  He states that there are two main enemies of hope:  optimism and despair.

Optimism is easily mistaken for hope because it confidently asserts a positive outcome.  Optimism points to a far horizon, unsullied by present circumstances. In effect, optimism closes our eyes to the present, calls us out of a conflicted present to practice a kind of wishful thinking about a dislocated, detached future.  

Hope differs from optimism in that hope remains firmly grounded in the present circumstance with eyes wide open to the reality of what is.  However, the aperture of hope is wide—it draws upon a horizon of remembrance that widens the angle of vision on any given moment.

Hope gives us the capacity to interrogate the present, to raise questions, to probe for possibility. Hope is not invulnerable.  It is capacious enough to encompass the disappointments and sufferings of the present.  Hope does not know the answer as much as it enables us to live amidst the unanswerable.

The other enemy to hope is despair.  Whereas optimism seeks to escape from the present into a distant, unsullied future, despair is the experience of being overwhelmed, consumed by the present.  The dominant mood of despair is resignation.  It is the feeling of being entirely and completely defined by whatever difficult circumstance we find ourselves in.  

If optimism claims to know too much about the future, despair knows too little.  Or perhaps more to the point, despair gives up on the future all together.
Hope is more humble than optimism and more bold than despair.  

Hope refuses to be engulfed in or consumed by the moment.  At the same time, it refuses to escape the moment into some distant, dislocated future.  It operates at a kind of middle-distance.  Hope always brings memory and anticipation to every present and thereby grants us the capacity to be responsive (vs. reactive), available (vs. anxious), and attentive (vs. distracted). Hope rejects simple answers, quick fixes, easy solutions.   

Hope spends less time asking questions like:
What has happened to us?
What will happen  to us?  
Why is this happening to us?

Instead, hope moves us to focus on questions like:

In light of this moment, 
What will be required of us? 

Given what is happening, 
​What is being asked of us?

A favorite story of mine comes from the writing of E.B. White.  A few years after the death of his wife, he wrote an essay on her love of gardening.  Every year in the Fall, when it came time to plant, she would plan carefully, putting in her orders to seed catalogues,  and created a new diagram for each year’s planting.   In her latter years, after she became ill, and nearly an invalid, she would still make her way to the garden to plant….

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little wool hat, put on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot.  

There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while her helper produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for intricate interment.  

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small hunched over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

Calmly plotting the resurrection.

Standing on the threshold of this moment in our national life, we have been shaken out of any illusion of an easy certainty about the future.  In unanticipated ways, we have been awakened to the truth of how little we can assume, know, control, or predict.  

There would be difficult days ahead—that Jesus made sure his disciples were certain of.  But, wherever they were, whatever their circumstance, they must remember Him, this night, this bread, this cup.  

In doing so they will remember how little they knew on that night, in that moment of what was to come.  In that remembrance, the opaqueness of whatever present they were in would be exposed and hope awakened.

On this All Saints Sunday, in the company of witnesses seen and unseen, we are called once again to be gathered into that remembrance and the hope it makes possible…a hope that enables us to dig in to this moment without fear and, with all those who have gone before us, to go on our way calmly plotting the resurrection.