RE Voices, May 2026

May 2026

It’s May!  The deciduous trees are putting out their tiny leaves! (hooray)  The pine trees are coating the world in yellow pollen! (NOT hooray)  And it is time to clean out the planting beds ready to start putting in the vegetables and herbs.  If you’d like to support our local farm-to-table donation effort, Community Harvest Project’s Plantapalooza is taking orders until Monday, May 4th for pick-up of plants on May 8th.  The plant sale helps fund CHP’s donations of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables to local food banks.  They also have volunteer hours all season to plant, tend, and harvest.  UUSGU often puts together a harvest team in late summer or early fall.  

Although people are more likely to imagine flower gardens when they hear the word beauty,  full baskets of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, and peppers can be just as beautiful.  Where else do you see beauty? I think beauty can be found many places--in the eyes of a mother looking at her child, in the evening sky as the sun goes down, in a field of clover a-buzz with bees, even in the angular projections of an urban skyline.  If you haven’t guessed by now, our theme at UUSGU for the month of May is beauty.

This month our services will be exploring different aspects of beauty in word and song as well as in pictures.  The music department will be hosting a Spirited Multigenerational service on May 17th with poetry readings and performances by the choir, talented individuals, and our RE children.  See the back for more details about that. Also on May 17th we’ll be beautifying the church during our annual spring clean-up day.

We still have several of the earth-shaped seed papers left over from this past Sunday’s service.  If you would like one, stop by my office during Fellowship Hour.  

Veggie photo by Vije Vijendranath on Unsplash Garden photo by Brittney Strange on Unsplash 

Last Sunday at UUSGU

I’d like to thank all the children who participated in the Pageant on Earth Day.  I was told it was kind of hard to see our small actors, so I’d welcome suggestions from parents as to ways to make it easier to see them.  Our cast was as follows:

Kitchi Manitou -- Ezra

Sky Woman -- Bette Lotterman

Swans -- Grace and Fiona

Turtle -- Greysen

Loon -- Saiorse

Muskrat -- Zoe

Unfortunately, I forgot to arrange for the important role of Official Photographer.  If any parents or grandparents took a photo they’d be willing to share, please let me know.

This Sunday at UUSGU

Our Spirit Play lesson this week will be another turtle story.  Turtles are my favorites among the reptile and amphibian animals, so I’ve been happy to see that we have lots of stories involving turtles in our story cupboard.  Parents, please pick your children up in the Spirit Play classroom after the service.

Also this week we will be having our May Youth Group Meeting at noon.  I believe the kids will be meeting upstairs for their lunch before going down to the Youth Room.  I believe youth and their parents will be getting an email from the Youth Team with more details.

Later this Month

In RE on May 10th the children will be choosing items that we would like to assist with (or do outright) at the June 21st service.  I sent out a survey earlier this week to parents to determine how many children we may expect for the June service, because that will determine how many service elements we can take on.  Please check your inboxes and let me know.

On May 17th, the RE children will be participating in the Multigen music and poetry service.  We’ll be singing the song “I Have a Light” that we did back at the Winter Solstice service and also doing signs or hand motions to a poem (Or to an additional simple song).  We hope to be able to practice these at the end of the May 10th session as well.  The church-wide clean-up will be after Fellowship Hour on May 17th.  I will have a couple projects that can be worked on down in the RE space by families working together--such as erasing and washing our chalkboard walls.  Let me know if you can stay for that so I know how many projects to plan for.

Finally, May 24th will be our Sunday Funday at Norcross Park (weather permitting)  I will send home permission slips for this on May 10th.  If the weather is bad we’ll have a games and art day in the Big Classroom.