For 335 years, Baltimore Yearly Meeting Friends have had the opportunity to live in community, to live in harmony, once a year at our Annual Session. Alternatives to Violence Programs speak of Transforming Power. Yearly Meeting for me has always been filled with Transforming Power, the power of Divine Love, and so has become in my life a Transforming Experience. I know I am not alone in having Transforming Experiences at Yearly Meeting.When I served on the Epistle Committee (for which I will again be seeking volunteers), we sat together and felt/heard the answer come to us in prayer. Yearly Meeting is one long experience for me of bumping into the right person at the right time, of having the person I need to talk with appear before me, before I even start looking for him or her. It’s spotting the right book at the right time in the bookstore. It’s getting answers. Last year it was hearing of the miracles that took place in our first-ever healing center. It’s watching children form bonds that last years. It’s watching parents share parenting. It’s watching Yearly Meeting work get done by committees that themselves become communities of love and harmony.

Why should you come to Yearly Meeting this year? Because we need you and you need us. It’s as simple as that.

Our reaction to Tom Fox’s kidnapping showed me, as nothing else has in recent years, that we are one community. Even if we didn’t know him, and many of us did through his years of attendance at our Annual Session, youth conferences, and work at Opequon Camp, even if we didn’t know him, we were touched by his service and love. We felt connected to Tom and through Tom to one another.

Dear Friends, let us not only feel connected in our grief; let us feel connected in love, in community, and in furthering Tom’s work.

Come to Yearly Meeting and let yourself feel loved. Come to Yearly Meeting and together we will tap into the Source of all Love. Come to Yearly Meeting and have an experience of “Living in Harmony.”

Lauri Perman, State College