This weekend, for the first time, I’ll be officiating at a wedding at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church. And yesterday, the bride and groom brought me an unexpected gift. To quote John Wesley, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” It brought back wonderful memories of my childhood in the Moravian Church in North Carolina.

On Sunday, March 1, I’ll actually be talking about my background in the Moravian Church, highlighting its history, traditions, and hymnody.  My discussion will take place between the 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. worship services that morning at Palmer, which is located at 6221 Main Street in Houston. People have been curious here about my background as a Moravian. So I’ll address that, but I also hope it will cause folks to appreciate their own backgrounds in various traditions and how, in many cases, parts of them enrich not only their own experience of the Episcopal Church (or whatever tradition is different from a previous one) but also ours.

In the meantime, let’s reflect on unexpected gifts as this week’s haiku theme. It might be something related to a tangible gift, like the Moravian cookies that I’m suddenly enjoying. It might be a verse about an intangible gift that we have either received or given away or handed down from one generation to another. Whatever you write about, do it with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line. Here’s the one that I created:

Thanks for the cookies —
Moravian tradition,
now with choc’late. Yum!