Farewell from Lily
After ten years at St. Mark’s, it is time for me and my partner Chas to embark on our next adventure. This June, we will move to Salida, a small town in south central Colorado. Like St. Mark’s, Salida and its surrounding mountains are sacred ground for me and a place where I have deep roots.
I will deeply miss St. Mark’s and intend to remain prayerfully connected with the community. In preparing last year’s Impact Report, I was heartened by Rev. Nick’s recognition of the “St. Mark’s diaspora” and I know that I am joining a strong contingent of folks who are no longer physically in the parish but remain part of our family. Rev. Matt was an incredible mentor and taught me a lot about how to say a good goodbye.
Over my time here at St. Mark’s, I have learned and grown so much. I have built relationships that I know will continue to carry me and I have been so blessed to connect with the youth, families, and children of this amazing community. Some of my current Children’s Program kids were once babies whose births and baptisms I was there to celebrate. My first year of Youth Group members are now young adults with careers!
It will be difficult to leave, but I am confident that this is the beginning of a wonderful new chapter for both me and St. Mark’s. I hope to leave the CYFC program with a strong foundation to build on what’s working and grow into new vibrancy.
I will forever be grateful for all of the ways that St. Mark’s has welcomed me, blessed me, taught me, helped me, and loved me. Thank you again to everyone at St. Mark’s whose support, prayer, and presence has led me through and will continue to guide me.
I first set foot in St. Mark’s for the 2015 De-Greening. I didn’t know about this event, but after hearing the announcements, I stayed afterwards to help take down the Christmas decorations. Someone put a faux poinsettia in my hands and told me where it went in the basement. I knew in that moment, being handed a task and invited into the work and life of the parish, that St. Mark’s had a place for me. Now, things have come full circle and have led the participation of youth and children in the De-Greening for the past few years!
I kept returning, and soon afterwards, Rev. Matt McDermott made another announcement about needing help with the youth program. I had a background in youth ministry – I came to Christianity after being invited to youth group with a friend as a teenager, and before moving to California, I’d helped lead a youth ministry in Tucson, AZ. I set up a meeting with Rev. Matt, and the rest was history.
In mid-2015, I became the lay youth minister for St. Mark’s. Together with Rev. Matt, we spun up a Youth Group that met weekly and hosted egg smashing contests, Nerf battles, overnights, Disneyland trips, and more. It was a heyday for St. Mark’s youth, with a core group of teens who are now young adults starting their professional careers in everything from the National Park Service to emergency medicine.
2015 Youth Group Disneyland Trip
St. Mark’s was my first experience with the Episcopal church, so my first year, I took the confirmation class in addition to helping teach it! It was fun and humbling to be co-leading the class while also learning alongside the other confirmands. I was then confirmed at Grace Cathedral in the spring of 2016.
The Confirmation Class Retreat 2015
Confirmation 2016
The summer of 2015 was also my first trip with the Sierra Service Project. This quickly became a highlight of the program year and my personal year as we took a number of youth every summer to do service work in underserved communities in Oregon, California, and Arizona.
Some of the 2015 Sierra Service Project attendees from St. Mark’s
2015 was my first Parish Retreat. I would go on to attend every retreat after that, leading youth programming including hikes, campouts, Scripture study, and a collaborative contribution to the Variety Show. In 2016, our youth began a tradition of writing a rap based on that weekend’s Gospel passage, which included a performance titled “Break Bread Every Day” based on a rap song with lyrics that aren’t exactly Gospel centered. Believing that they were getting one over on their naive youth minister inspired our kids to really get serious and develop a great presentation, but now that I’m leaving, I can finally say that I recognized the inspiration immediately. I was just glad the kids were so engaged!
Over the next few years, the Saint Mark’s Youth Group saw its ups and downs. We recruited volunteers, tried different things, welcomed new youth and sent off graduates. We participated in beloved St. Mark’s traditions and created some new ones. That was also the year we remodeled the Youth Room with the help of my co-living housemates. I felt firmly rooted in the St. Mark’s community. I performed at the Easter Vigil, cooked for Hotel de Zink, created the Annual Slideshow, took home a silly white elephant gift from the Staff & Vestry Christmas Party, led Sunday morning forums, took youth to Grace Cathedral for special events, brought my lizard Blaise to the Blessing of the Animals, and had truly found a home.
2016 Beach Boardwalk Worship Night & Campout
2016 Sierra Service Project
2016 Grace Cathedral Sleepover
In 2017, my life went through some major changes, which were all supported by my St. Mark’s family. I moved out of my co-living house and became the therapeutic foster parent to a 13 year old boy, who was immediately embraced by St. Mark’s. He joined us for multiple Parish Retreats and throughout his years with me, we were uplifted by the community of St. Mark’s with prayer, patience, and presence. He is now 21 years old!
2017 was also the first year I preached a sermon at St. Mark’s. (I was actually scheduled to preach the Sunday after the 2016 election, but Rev. Matt and I decided that the community needed to hear from their rector that week and we found another time for my first turn at the pulpit.) I would go on to preach multiple times per year, and the feedback I got from Rev. Matt and the rest of the community helped me grow as a writer and aspiring theologian. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to preach at St. Mark’s and wrestle with the lectionary alongside all the amazing thinkers in our parish.
2017 Confirmation Retreat
2017 Parish Retreat
2017 Sierra Service Project
After determining that we liked the Smith River site the best, most years that we did the Sierra Service Project, we made an 8 hour drive up to Smith River, OR. I still have the 8-hour playlist I created for these drives. This was the year of the infamous walkie talkie prank, where the kids and chaperone in the other van tricked me into believing that I had left one of our youth at an In-N-Out in rural Northern California. I can proudly report that during my tenure at St. Mark’s, I have never actually lost a youth, and we have only had a few minor fire-related incidents.
A photo from the 2017 “Adventure Day” at SSP. During the SSP week, we usually spent time in communities doing construction work, but on Wednesdays, we did outdoor work. This project was removing invasive beach grasses that were damaging the habitat for local bees, birds, and other animals. I learned in 2025 that this project has been completed – after years of work from SSP youth, all the invasive grasses have been removed from the area!
My bright blue hatchback has been a fixture in the St. Mark’s parking lot for as long as I’ve been here. In 2017, I drove a handful of youth up to Hume Lake for a Christian youth winter camp featuring worship music and snow activities. On the last day, our kids helped me dig it out and our youth volunteer, Parker Chambers, helped me get snow chains on. It was my first time ever driving with them!
2018 SSP Trip to Navajo Nation
2018 Confirmation
2019 Ice Skating Party
2019 Volunteering at Project WeHOPE
2019 MLK overnight at Grace Cathedral
Everything changed in 2020. The global pandemic meant that we could not worship in person together. Anxiety was high and everyone had more questions than answers. Rev. Matt frequently identified our position as “betwixt and between.” That was also the year I took on children’s ministry in addition to youth ministry. With the rest of St. Mark’s leadership, I tried to figure out how to connect with children, youth and families and how to live as a person of faith in such an uncertain and chaotic time.
We met online and outdoors. We tried using various methods to stay connected, from Zoom meetings to a traveling journal. For Thanksgiving 2020, I helped create a “video sermon” about gratitude, filmed in a tiny AirBNB Chas and I rented to quarantine together. My hair grew longer than it had been since I started at St. Mark’s. I filmed brief YouTube videos for kids and families.
Outdoor Youth Group gathering 2020
Watching St. Mark’s service online with my lizard Blaise
Gifts we created to deliver to youth still stuck at home for the beginning of the school year, August 2020. Father Matt delivered a lot of them on his bicycle!
As vaccines rolled out and quarantines lifted, things continued to change at St. Mark’s. I was now also the Children’s Minister, and the pandemic had shifted the priorities for most of our kids and families. Youth group numbers dropped, and there was a renewed focus on including young people in our Sunday morning worship rather than running separate programming during the service. We experimented with lots of different responses to these new needs and ultimately developed a new program featuring liturgical jobs, coloring bulletins, and different youth events.
Taking on Children’s Ministry meant adding things like the Easter Egg Hunt, the Palm Sunday Processional, and the Christmas Pageant to my plate. I had a great time with all of these, learning about old St. Mark’s traditions and putting my own spin on them. We played games at the Parish Picnic, cooked Hotel de Zink dinner, shared skits at Parish Retreat, and consumed our body weight in candy.
Because I always return home to visit family in Arizona for Christmas, running the pageant from afar meant relying on lots of amazing volunteers to help things go smoothly, and it’s always fun seeing how the cast and crew comes together on Christmas Eve to make the pageant magic happen.
Preaching at Blessing of the Animals 2021
Making “prayer snowflakes” at Advent 2021
Parish Retreat 2021
One big change I helped lead as part of the Children’s Program was shifting to full inclusion of kids in the Sunday morning worship service. With the help and support of the clergy and the whole parish community, we stopped doing Children’s Chapel and worked on ways to bring kids into church with things like fidget bins, coloring bulletins, worship buddies, and liturgical jobs. Some of these initiatives stuck, while others didn’t – and I was so grateful for the creativity, flexibility, and patience of the kids, their families, and everyone else at St. Mark’s while we worked this out.
An early iteration of the coloring bulletins, liturgical jobs board & fidget bins
We continued to ride the waves of change and “holy chaos” through the last few years, but my ministry never stopped being fun and fulfilling. We went on trips to Grace, cooked agape, celebrated anything and everything on the liturgical calendar, and stood up for our values in our community and around the world.
Kids cook Hotel de Zink 2023
Parish Retreat 2024
Pride at Grace Cathedral 2024
Blessing of the Animals 2025
No Kings Protest 2025
Shrove Tuesday 2025
It has been a spectacular decade here at St. Mark’s and I am forever grateful for every single member of my St. Mark’s family. The next ten years will look different for me and for St. Mark’s, and I’m sure there are plenty of surprises coming our way. I’m equally sure we’ll weather them in St. Mark’s style – with grace, love, thoughtfulness, humor, and plenty of brainstorming meetings.
It is impossible to name all the people who have been so important to me during my time here, but I want to especially thank, in no particular order: Rev. Matt McDermott, Mary Esther and Tom Schnaubelt, Virginia Rock, Ellen and Bryan Ford, Rev. Debie Thomas, Rev. Nikky Wood, Rev. Nick Roosevelt, Parker Chambers, Alex Dillard, Katie Weller, Kathy Chen, Carla Bliss, Brie Linkenhoker, Jane Piller-Wilson, Zareen Ahmad Brock, Debbie Clark, Matthew Burt, Wenjing Li, Rev. Nancy Ross, and Rev. Kirsten Spalding.