2024 Labor Day Retreat
Theme: “Everybody Has a Story…”

You are invited to join us at Mt Cross for our annual Labor Day Retreat! We have a full day of programming on Sunday, September 1 and a weekend option for those that want to spend more time at the camp. Look for the Labor Day Retreat table in the Welcome Zone before and after worship during July and August to learn more and register!
Check out the Labor Day Retreat handbook for details! You can print the registration form and Acknowledgement of Risk formin advance.
On Sep 1, 8:45 Worship will be in Cupertino, as usual. Our second service will be held at Mt Cross instead of Cupertino.

This year's theme is “Everybody has a story…” where we'll explore our own faith stories and those of our community. To help get your story-juices flowing, each week we’ll look at one of the themes from Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” and ponder how that can be applied to our own faith stories.

Here’s your Faith Story Big Ideas of the Week:

(June 20)— Anne Lamott describes how becoming a writer means writing about everything that happens to you and around you. How might this be applied to our faith stories? Your faith story also includes everything that happens to you and around you. It includes the ups and the downs, the good and the bad, the transcendent and the absolutely mundane. It includes what you learned in Sunday school or hear in sermons, but it also includes that coffee chat with a friend where you felt fully and wholly seen. It includes the times when you were a hero, but also the times when you were a villain. It doesn’t just include you, either! It includes other characters, various settings, and a whole host of subplots and spin-offs. All of the components make up your faith story, and none of them should be erased. Cuz that wouldn’t make for a very interesting story, would it?

(June 27)— Anne Lamott declares that to find your own voice, you have to be honest with your reader. In the context of our faith stories, this might seem hard or scary. What about the parts of our stories that we’re ashamed or embarrassed about? Well, if we try to sanitize our stories they’ll end up sounding like the bland musings of ChatGPT. People don’t want to hear stories with no voice. They want to hear stories with feeling — with excitement, thrill, joy, and triumph, but also with hurt, sadness, failure, and loss. Because at the end of the day, people want to hear stories that let them know they’re not alone.

(July 4)— Anne Lamott tells new writers: have faith in your ability to write, even when you think you’re not doing a great job. This is something we all need to hear — not just writers. It is so easy to feel like we’re not doing a good job at really anything in life — let alone being a “good Christian”. But maybe it’s not ourselves we need to have faith in. Maybe it’s God we can have faith in — faith that God can work through us to do great things — even, and perhaps especially, when we feel like we’re not doing a good job.

(July 11)— Anne Lamott says that to become a good writer, you should establish a daily writing routine. What does it mean to have a “faith routine”? Some people might posit that “to become a good person of faith, you need to pray and read the Bible every day”. But if you sit down every day and just write the alphabet, that will hardly amount to a story. Perhaps it’s less about following strict, surface-level rules everyday, and maybe it’s more about being intentional about revisiting the story each day. For an author, maybe this means not having to physically write every single day, but spending some days simply pondering the story or getting out in the world and doing some research. Similarly for us, maybe we don’t have to pray and read the Bible everyday, but maybe we can find some small way to connect with God, with others, or with ourselves each day.