Wondering Presbyterian

My husband and I just celebrated our second wedding anniversary and he bought us a Virtual Reality system. We’ve done VR a couple of times at the mall, and I’m a huge fan. Not sure what it is about this that I love. There’s an underwater game that I play where I basically sit under water and watch fish. It’s incredibly meditative, but I have to be careful because if I sit there too long, I get a bad headache. At the end of the day, it might feel like I’m underwater, but I’m also still just looking at a screen. Not great for your eyes. My church has a vision team that is looking at the different realities of our congregation and our culture. Our recent conversations have been about generations. Most recently, we watched a webcast from the Barna group’s partnership with World Vision. They did a huge study on millennials – “the connected generation.” As a millennial myself, (there are many definition of millennials, but the most accepted definition is anyone born between 1981 and 1996)

            Recently, I attended a 3-day conference on stewardship. The conference (Stewardship Kaleidoscope) was held in San Diego, Ca and it was wonderful. I ran into several people that I knew, which was a surprise, including someone I graduated with from seminary. The theme was “vital signs of a healthy steward.”             (Aside: Stewardship is a “churchy” word. A steward takes care of something. Stewardship is how we take care of things whether it’s time and place, money, our bodies, each other, our environment, etc. I’ve heard it said that stewardship is not a program; it’s a lifestyle.)             Our keynote speaker was Erik Law, a writer, episcopal priest, and the founder of the Kaleidoscope Institute ( https://www.kscopeinstitute.org/ ). In one of the group exercises, everyone got bookmarks that represented currency (it could be monetary currency, but could also be the currency of time/place, wellness, leadership, relationship, or truth, what Eric Law calls the H