Happy November,

I woke up yesterday and it was 50 degrees cooler than it had been!  That’s about half the normal total degrees!  Someone told me “There’s nothing between Canada and Houston but a picket fence in Oklahoma.”  I think I’m beginning to see what they meant!  I have enough clothes for a couple days, so few clothes are progressing through the wash cycle quite quickly these days.

I think we are starting to look forward to Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Years.  Its hard to get excited about all that with Halloween just a couple days ago, but volunteers and leaders here at Emerson have been planning on it for some time now.  We hope it will be a fun and spiritually uplifting time for all of us.  The holidays can be great for many of us and they can be a time through which many of us hold our breath, pinch our nose and hope passes quickly.  We here at Emerson hope to provide everyone with an opportunity for peace during the Holidays this year.

Our pledge drive has been going well.  The response so far has been just heartwarming.  Your commitment to helping Emerson fulfill its mission has been a sight for my sore eyes.

Why sore eyes, you might ask?  I am looking into this Houston mayoral election.  What has been interesting is this focus on crime.  I feel bad for the police chief who is walking around town yelling that crime statistics are actually down substantially since the pandemic spike.  Despite his data, much of the focus of the mayoral race seems to be on “being tough on crime”…probably because that strategy has worked so many times in so many places before! Not!  Of course, crime doesn’t emerge from nothing.  If we really wanted to fix crime, we’d propose making sure everyone had a job that paid a living wage.  I believe we could get rid of a whole bunch of crime that way.  Alas, the only jobs of interest in this election are more and more underpaid police.  Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  So, we get faster and faster horses.

And, of course, this month brought the next chapter in the Middle Eastern conflict.  Faster horses and bigger hammers. Many of you have ties to that conflict and feelings run strong on both sides of the debate.  My thoughts go to the innocent lives being snuffed out on the margins.  Most of the dead in war didn’t stand to gain much no matter which side prevails and this war is no different.  My heart goes out to those of you with family or friends who are involved.  I am assuming they are peaceful bystanders.  Just like the Houston crime issue, the continued failure of our leadership to take this and other global conflicts seriously is painful to see.  Resolutions are always possible, but until we get to a point where war has no beneficiaries, I am afraid our history will continue to repeat itself.

But, I digress.  As we prepare to be engulfed by the Holidays, let me be the first to make a wish for Emerson. My wish for Emerson this Holiday Season is that we may individually and collectively bear the weight of our world.  May we stick together.  May we talk as one voice when we talk, walk as one crowd when we walk and may we be the change we wish to see in our world now and for seven generations to come.

Respectfully,

Rev Ed