Letter from Amy: Dec 31, 2025

Christmas Eve candlelight. Thanks to Whitney McArthur for the photo!

Dear Incarnation,

As we approach the close of 2025, I invite you to take some time to reflect. We have all lived through a year of significant local and national upheaval, impacting many of our jobs, neighborhoods, and relationships. And so I invite you to carve out a bit of time this week — before work, school, and other responsibilities begin again full-force — to step back and reflect with God.

On Sunday, we prayed a Year-End Examen during the Prayers of the People, as we typically do on the final Sunday of the year. If you have just 5-10 minutes to reflect, you may wish to use this prayer as a guide; you can find it here. In addition, I always offer this Great Annual Examen as a more comprehensive tool for prayerfully reflecting on the past year and looking ahead.

I have been doing a lot of reflecting myself. One of the great privileges of my job is getting to see up close the way God is working in your lives, and the many (often small) ways you courageously and faithfully follow him. This year, I have witnessed many of you deepening in prayer; pursuing healing; returning to scripture; forgiving and reconciling with others; persevering through loss and change; advocating for the marginalized; caring for the suffering; taking bold steps of faith toward new life decisions; and laboring with integrity in the midst of vocational challenges. In countless ways, your lives have embodied grace and preached the “gospel of showing up.” I pray that God would nourish and sustain you to continue this good work in 2026.

I also pray that God would nourish and sustain the work of our church. As I wrote in our year-end finance letter, we spent a lot of 2025 “chasing a car down a hill,” trying to catch up and jump in to where God was already going. It’s been exhilarating and unexpected. On Sunday, we will do something that would have seemed laughable a couple years ago, and still feels borderline impossible for a church of our size: we will commission our friends to plant Church of the Holy Comforter in Hyattsville, MD.

And then we will pray, watch, wait, and hope for what God does next in our midst. How will this change open up new possibilities to welcome people who are longing to find their home in God? Who will God bring through the doors of Incarnation and Holy Comforter (not just the church doors, but the doors of our homes and schools and workplaces)? How will God deepen our roots, extend our branches, prune us, and bring forth new fruit in us? What is he calling our churches to be or do in this next season? We don’t yet know where this car is going! All we know is that we are in it, God is driving, and he knows the way.

But church planting also means saying goodbye, and with that goodbye comes grief. We have worshiped together for a long time. We have made baptism promises to each other’s children, witnessed the Spirit poured out in each other’s confirmations, and served, laughed, played, studied, prayed, feasted, celebrated, and grieved together. Katie has been a faithful and loving shepherd of our flock for many years. We will miss one another. A lot. Things will feel weird for a while. This is all normal and expected, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult.

And there’s another layer of grief in our church community this week. Rachel Lord, a beloved friend and member of the Holy Comforter community, died early Monday morning. Rachel, her husband Sam, and her daughters Mona and Eliza have also visited Incarnation in Virginia a number of times, and many of you have had the opportunity to meet, talk, and pray with them over the past year. Rachel’s death is heartbreaking. Please hold her family in your prayers.

Death is always a bitter reminder that the world is not yet as it should be. But the season of Christmas reminds us that Jesus was born to be God With Us in our humanity — all the way from birth to death. Jesus knows the sting and pain and injustice of death. He wept over the death of his friend. And in his great love for us, Jesus chose to die, defeating death and restoring humanity to the life with God for which we were always intended. As we sang on Sunday:

Light and life to all he brings,

Ris'n with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by,

Born that man no more may die,

Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give us second birth.

And so on Sunday, we will commission our friends to welcome many into the healing wings of Christ. There will be joy. There will be layers of grief. And God — the Incarnation, the Holy Comforter — will be with us through it all.

With love,

Amy

p.s. Today is the last day for end-of-year giving. I’d be honored if you would consider a gift to Incarnation, and to our special Advent offering for Church of the Holy Comforter, as part of your year-end giving. You can find a link to both here. Thank you!

p.p.s. We’re sending out our friends with a “Holy Comfort Food” potluck of cobblers/crisps and warm drinks after the service. Bring a pan of your favorite fruit cobbler on Sunday to share. Thank you!