The Rev. Timothy Ellis will share about the vulnerability of love. We’ll explore some of the nervousness of connecting with others and asking for our needs to be met, along with the moments of connection that are the building blocks of relationships. Timothy is our intern minister.

Pam Blankenheim is the Worship Associate

The Rev. Jenny Peek will speak. Sometimes climate change feels like the elephant in the room we struggle to talk about. We may feel carried away by Joanna Macy’s steady message of the decades, frightened by the harsh truths as told by Naomi Klein, and moved to tears and action by Greta Thunberg’s clear minded message and school strikes for climate.

And still, here we are. When human ingenuity fails to save the day, what is next?

Rev, Jenny serves our sibling congregation in Pocatello, Idaho.

Melody Lenkner is the Worship Associate

Pam Blankenheim will lead the discussion of the thirteen original Freedom Riders. One of them was Pam’s husband, Ed Blankenheim, who traveled from Washington, D.C. to the deep South in hopes of sitting blacks and whites together to challenge the Jim Crow laws that were active in the South despite UCC rulings that desegregated interstate travel.

The bus Pam’s husband was on was firebombed. These thirteen Freedom Riders barely escaped with their lives. Ed was a young Marine in North Carolina, where he witnessed segregation and racism.

Perri Gardner will lead a celebration of chocolate. “In all its varied and protean forms, love is the tether binding our whirling lives. Without that biological anchor, all of us are flung outward, singly, into the encroaching dark” (Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love, 2000).

Join Magic Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship congregant Perri Gardner for a conversation about how love defines who we are and how we live in community. This service will incorporate an emerging Unitarian Universalist ritual–chocolate communion. Chocolates will be provided!

Cindy Strausbaugh is Worship Associate