Fr Robert Hendrickson

A Christmas Message from the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

Around 20 years ago, before the ordination process and the adoption process, my wife and I bought these festive plates and most of these Rudolph decorations. We bought them with the idea and hope that we’d get them out to have a fun Christmas meal with our as yet unseen and unknown kids. (pictures below this note)

We boxed them up in our first big move 16 years ago. Not long after that move I started the ordination process so Christmas meals got a little more “catch as catch can” and kids seemed further and further away.

But we did get some nice chinaware and silver along the way. We headed off to new places and it was fun to set up fancy dinners.

We got better china and crystal and silver. Christmas dinners were fun and it was great to polish and pour from decanters and practice perfectly packing Irish butter into little dishes with sea salt on top.

Then we found out we had two boys we were going to make a new family with! Then we had to pack and move! We were off to a new place. We still set up for a fancy Christmas because we knew where that stuff was. We knew how to do that dinner.

We moved again not long ago. I have some extra time this week because of the pandemic. We don’t have seven services between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, just a couple online. So I have time and we have this box — beat up — that said “Christmas China — fragile.”

Karrie wanted to look in it and see what was there.

There was this china. We found these decorations. We found these signs of hope we had boxed up twenty years ago. So this year we have the time, we have these boys and our family, we don’t have any big, fancy plans or guests coming or big parties to host nor places to go.

So we’re unboxing this hope of twenty years with the kids. We’re getting out stuff that sat forgotten in these moldy boxes and cleaning it off. A lot has come into alignment to get us here. These boxes have been through a lot of moves. Along the way there has been lots of heartache and busyness and joy and wondering.

Yet here we are, in a pandemic, realizing that we have a moment in time (when I may not have a Christmas Eve free or a Christmas Day open for decades), we have this time to be together in a way we dreamed of a long time ago.

This pandemic is awful and yet it gives signs of hope.

Here’s to signs of hope for this life and for the next that are revealed today. May you be blessed this Christmas season with joyful hope.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert