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For United Methodists, church meetings are never just meetings. Rather, when United Methodists gather, we become church, not by the things that each of us brings, but by the miracle of grace that God works among us through the raw materials of our words, our actions, our music, our prayers, our greetings of peace.

This grace is not irresistible. We can erect all sorts of barriers against it by the choices we make about how we use our time, by nurturing selfish hurts, by dwelling upon our disappointments, by failing to embrace the strangers who gather with us.

Or we can exercise our individual wills and decide that what each of us brings to the conference is far less important than what God is going to do with each of us through what others bring.

Then we are open to the meeting as a means of grace. And it will become a transforming moment of holy time in sacred space.

- Rev. William B. Lawrence