I continue to be amazed at how everything fits together. My first wife's parents had a loom which filled one of the rooms in their home. It was a beautiful machine and to watch it in operation was a magical process. It's where I came up with the metaphor that life itself is coming together on a loom of life. All the different threads of life come together to produce our life. Our life is filled with tints and hues of color that are so vivid and vibrant. We never know all the threads and points of connection that come together to make up the different events. But I think that is a good thing. We can only see a bit ahead because our light that lights the future only does it a little bit.
My wife and I talk often about all the threads that had to be in place to have our paths cross. We agree it is a good thing we didn't know what was ahead by going out on one date. We would have been a little overwhelmed. I've said before that Rachel will look at me now and then and state, "I only wanted a date!" We are so blessed that we both tend to live in the now. We both have undertaken projects which should have scared us because of the breadth and width of the events - we just didn't know any better so we said "Yes."
My example was when we were finishing up the 2014 Wednesday Interfaith Connection program. The program had been mildly successful and now it was time to decide about 2015.
We met at the end of the year and the SLC staff wanted to set up a committee to decide on a direction. We pulled out binders for everyone attending. The binder presented a full 2015 Interfaith Connection program with all 52 weeks laid out. It's intention was to produce income along with a heartfelt program. We would look at faith traditions, church leaders, musical groups, and other events in a deeper way. We would get to truly know the people, the faiths, and the musicians as to who they were.
It was a Camelot year. Our first program was the Sacramento return of Rev. Phil Pierson, the beloved Unity minister from Christ Unity Church. It took Phil ten minutes just to walk to the front of the room. We had musical magic including Karen Drucker, Acoustic Eidolon, a Buddhist Tabla group, and a night of acoustic guitars. We had Buddhist monks, Mormon bishops, Jewish rabbis, Muslim leaders, Seventh Day Adventists and many others. We took a team of 35 people, including 11 ministers to the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City.
During the year we averaged 35 people at the common meal prior to the service and 62 service attendees weekly. We later found out it was the most well attended Wednesday night interfaith service in the United States in 2015. It was a case of all the threads coming together perfectly, We said "Yes" without realizing what we were doing.
This story also included 10 field trips put together by Rachel visiting all sorts of faith traditions ranging from the mosque to the synagogue to the Mormon temple. What a year!
Rachel's example was in 2017 when she contacted Darshan Munday about takin a field trip to visit the Sikh Gurdwara in West Sacramento. Darshan instead proposed that Rachel collaborate a community visit to the temple late in the year. Before the year was out, Rachel connected with thousands of people in the region and before she was through a magical event happened. Over 500 visitors from some 23 faith traditions visited the temple in an afternoon program. It started with a service with music, then a period of time talking about the faith tradition and closed with a traditional langer meal. It was a rousing success! Again a case of saying "Yes" to an almost impossible event - but it worked.
So in the end the weaving loom goes in many directions but one thing is always required. You must show up and be willing to say "Yes." That is the way of the loom - are you ready to say "yes?" It just means you are ready for a miracle!
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