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Dear UU Parents and Guardians,


We are starting the re-entry process for our building!
Watch for emails from the office about registering for services for yourself and your children.

We will be first opening at 25% capacity. If you don't get into the in-person services, please continue to watch services or join Sunday School Sunday online, or join us on Thursday evenings for our music-based services. 

As we consider re-entry into the building - many hands make for light work. 
If you are willing and able to be a flexible volunteer and roll with the punches as we navigate re-opening, our children and youth really need dedicated (and vaccinated) adults from our church in their lives. 

I will be looking for: 
Online teachers for K-5 
In-person teachers for K-5 and Middle/HS
In-person assistants for K-5 and Middle/HS
'Floaters' who are willing to be SUPER flexible on Sunday mornings and 'go WHERE needed WHEN needed'


What will our format look like? 
Our Middle/HS will continue to meet online until 5/26 and in-person in June if we meet at church with our steps C and D for re-entry plan. 
Our K-5th group will meet online at 11am if we are in the 'low-yellow' or higher with the Covid dial. 


K-5th grade in-person will have a focus on UU Principles, with a fun addition of MAKERSPACE items! We'll be outside as much as possible, and when we are inside, we will focus on CONNECTION and CREATION. It will be SO FUN! 

Check out this article by Religious Educator, Joy Berry, about the benefits of Makerspace https://www.uua.org/re/blog/makerspace-a-new-way-in-religious-education


Curious about what safety measures we'll be taking for Sunday School? 
Mask Policy
Policy for Health with children in Sunday School (cleaning protocols,etc)


Plans for Re-Entry Into the Church Building Are Underway
Check out our newsletter for more information
https://www.unitarianlincoln.org/newsletter.html
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The church has a new website - and I have a BLOG! 
All the weekly emails since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 have now been uploaded for easy access. 
Monthly Soul Matters themes and the summer series on mindfulness can all be seen according to date. 
You can access the emails on our church's website here: https://www.unitarianlincoln.org/chelseas-blog
*Sunday School *


Approximately 30 minute program geared towards K-5, but is open to all ages
Sundays at 11am
We typically have a chalice lighting, story, guided discussion, and/or activity such as a scavenger hunt or art project to be done at home as part of these lessons.
Link: https://zoom.us/j/805185601        Password: unitarian


*Middle and HS *
We are joining up with the Omaha youth groups - 

Wednesdays at 7pm

Please email me for more information

DISCORD for Middle and High School
We invite all Middle and High School students from Omaha and Lincoln to join us for discussion and community through this app.
'Would you rather' questions - Thoughts along our monthly Soul Matters themes - 'Big questions' related to UUism.
Also - a "Pet Page"!!! So much fun.
***Be aware that once joining Discord, it opens up the app to multiple pages which will need to be moderated by students themselves and their parents/guardians for security.

https://discord.gg/3NuSj6f

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*Parent and Guardian Chat:*
The chance for parents and guardians to check in with me for 'open office hours'
Every other Thursday 8pm and every other Wednesday noon (I close the meeting after 15 minutes if no one checks in)



Thursday the 13th at 8pm
  https://zoom.us/j/5036046295    



Wednesday the 19th at noon

Link: https://zoom.us/j/5036046295

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Family Open Circle: 
Information can be found on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1081904435272577
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Videos This Week: 



Chelsea's Story-
A Tale of 2 Beasts
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K-5: Soul Matters Theme: Story
These materials come to us from the Soul Matters Curriculum team
At the Table


Around the Neighborhood
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Bonus Resources for Parents With the theme of: Story


Wise Words
We do not experience a world and afterward make up stories to understand it. Stories teach us what is real, what is true, and what is possible. They are not abstractions from life (though they can be that); they are necessary for our engagement with life. As the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
David Loy
 
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
 
There are no true stories; we are making up every one of them.
Pema Chodron
 
There are only true stories. We are discovering the truth in them.
Christina Baldwin


Many of us had thought that myth meant “not true,” when in fact the older meaning of myth is precisely “always true”!
Richard Rohr
 
When a person dies, a library is burned.
Edmund White
 
Stories are told as spells for binding the world together.
John Rouse
 
There is a you telling yourself another story of you. Listen to her.
Pádraig Ó Tuama
 
Those who tell the stories, rule the world.
Proverb, exact source unknown
 
Storytelling is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truth-teller… We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Change the story, change the world.
Terry Pratchett
 
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Neil Gaiman & G.K. Chesterton
 
As I considered it, the truth of the matter was that we were living within an old story; and a new story needed to be told, but we didn’t have the language for it. The old story was of victimization, marginalization, oppression, oppressors; and the new story would see all of us evolving, self-expanding, and finding a new place in this wonderful cosmology that is a reality we have not paid attention to. So, in order to get to that point—and here is where my transformation begins—I had to reconsider what I thought about people, because I had hardened my view of others and who they were and what they meant. I had spent my time raising two little African American boys who had to be taught how to survive in society. In doing that, I taught them to view the world in only one way; and I myself was hardened into a position that either you were with me or you were against me or us.
Barbara Holmes
 
Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land. As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.” In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them? In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn.
Robin Wall Kimmerer

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil… You can tell it’s a true war story if it embarrasses you.
Tim O’Brien, from How To Tell a True War Story
 
We evolve in the midst of narratives meant only for some and ways of being made narrow by fear and power. We must, then, have the courage to listen to the truth of our own lives, to the wisdom that comes from within.
enfleshed
 
Your heartache is someone else’s hope. If you make it through, somebody else is going to make it through. Tell your story.
Kim McManus
 
Telling, Laura Hershey
Full piece at https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/telling 
 
Those without power
risk everything to tell their story
and must.
Someone, somewhere,
will hear your story and decide to fight,
to live and refuse compromise...
 
Practice listening beyond, or beneath, opinions. Opinions are only the thinnest surface sitting on top of the deep stories that we all carry.
Rev. Rod Richards
 
Only share with people who have earned the right to hear your story... [Ask yourself,] “With whom am I in a relationship that can bear the weight of my story?”
Brené Brown
 
We cannot wish old feelings away nor do spiritual exercises for overcoming them until we have woven a healing story that transforms our previous life's experience and gives meaning to whatever pain we have endured.
Joan Borysenko
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