Rev. Dan Albrant serves as the pastor for both Mineral and Mt. Pleasant UMC’s.
Welcome to the website for the Mineral-Mount Pleasant Charge of The United Methodist Church! We are very glad you stopped by for a visit and to learn more about us. Our churches have been yoked together in a charge (that is they share one pastor) since 1947. The churches themselves are only about 6 miles apart, one in the town of Mineral, and the other closer to the town of Louisa.
I have been the pastor of this Charge since July 2022. I was pastor of the Madison Charge in Madison, Virginia, from July 2017 to June 2022. Prior to that I was a hospital clinical pharmacist, practicing in intensive care, emergency departments, and operating rooms. I served as a consultant on new pharmacist practices and quality improvement as well as designing and implementing new training programs for pharmacists to improve patient outcomes.
You may be wondering how I got from Pharmacy to Ministry? Good question…it was an evolution. I was called by God to be a pharmacist, of that I am certain. During my time working in the high stress, low touch environment of intensive care, I began to feel disquieted in my soul. Something was missing – I needed to care for people in a different and more wholistic way. So, God moved me along a path of rejoining church, getting involved in Stephen Ministry as a minister and leader, and in an intentional period of spiritual growth. All this took about 12 years before I found myself at age 50 with the strong desire to attend Seminary. I attended Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, from 2013 to 2017 and graduated with a Masters of Divinity degree with honors.
The United Methodist Church has gone through a season of change with disaffiliation of about 20% of its churches. That time has now ended, and both of these churches remain firmly United Methodist under the care and direction of our Resident Bishop. Our worship style is Traditional, and sermons come directly from the weekly scripture readings of the Revised Common Lectionary (used by many Christian denominations). There is a Choir at the Mineral UMC and many wonderful ministries for you to engage in at both churches. We hope that you will come and give us a try one Sunday. You will be warmly welcomed, and we believe that you will feel like you are at home.
I love serving the rural church and her people. My wife and I have found a home here at Lake Anna and we look forward to many years of ministry outreach, worship, fellowship and fun. We enjoy sharing our lives with those whom God has called to be the church of Jesus Christ. We have two young adult sons, one of whom flies for NetJets and the other who is training to be an electrician. Our black Labrador, Hope, rounds out our immediate family. Let me know how I might be of service to you, or how we might pray for people or situations that are important to you. You can find copies of my sermons under the "Blogs" tab and links to other resources for your spiritual journey. May God bless you on your way!
Getting Even
It doesn’t take too long in our lives before the first time we are wronged by another person. Maybe we’re not chosen when picking sides for kickball, maybe the teacher makes an example of us for things others were doing, maybe we’re not chosen for a job advancement because we’re not as well connected politically as another candidate, maybe our girlfriend or boyfriend dumps us for someone else. No matter what the cause, in our hurt we can often want to “get even” with the person who wronged us. Revenge is a normal human reaction to being hurt by another and contemplating how we are going to get even distracts us from our woundedness.
The problem with getting even is that hurting others because we have been hurt never solves the issue. In fact, things often escalate because the person we wrong then wants to get even with us. We heard the Secretary of State this week talk about not giving Iran an “eye for an eye” (i.e., a proportional response to an injury) but rather “a head for an eye”. We can all easily see how this kind of thinking can lead us all to ruin. We can conjure up memories of Hatfields and McCoys, Mafia and other gang violence, civil wars and even world-wide wars that were begun with seemingly small wounds and rhetoric that grew to kill millions of people.
The old adage that “wounded people, wound people” is true. It doesn’t have to be that way, but until we learn that “getting even” never heals our wounds, we will continue in the spiral of strike and counterstrike. Writer Steve Maraboli teaches about how to disconnect ourselves from this harmful behavior stating, “Let today be the day you stop being haunted by the ghost of yesterday. Holding a grudge and harboring anger/resentment is poison to the soul. Get even with people...but not those who have hurt us - forget them, instead get even with those who have helped us.” That sounds more like Jesus and the other great spiritual teachers who remind us that living in the past costs us our lives.
The blessed assurance that we have as beloved children of God is that we are surrounded by other beloved children of God. Humans make mistakes and injure others. This is why laws from the time of King Hammurabi (written some 3700 years ago) established a proportional response by the judicial system when people were injured by someone else, “an eye for an eye” etc. This prevented the escalation of violence that we still witness today. Ancient Israel had this teaching (see Deuteronomy, Exodus and Leviticus) and Jesus taught about it in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus, however, did something different, he taught us not to respond violently, but to “turn the other cheek”. Jesus taught us to uncouple the revenge mediated violence that leads to our ruin.
God loves us and wants us to love others the way that God loves them. When we do this, then we operate under the philosophy that there is no way to ever “get even”. Loving and forgiving the person, even when something seriously goes wrong (think of all the mass shootings over the last 30+ years) is hard, but it sets us free from living our lives in the past and the poison of being awash in resentments.
There are a lot of resent-filled people in our world right now. Social media feeds contain many people venting about how they’ve been wronged by the system, by certain politicians or political parties, by society, etc. They incite others to violence by putting their wounds on display and pointing to retribution as the only way forward. Jesus shows us another way, however. If you are looking for a way out of your past hurts and thoughts of “getting even”, then I invite you to a faith community this week. I invite you to talk with the pastor or wise spiritual friends about how you are feeling and seek guidance from them on a positive way forward. They will help you heal and work on getting even with those who help you – paying forward your blessings into the world. In this way, God’s kingdom becomes real. May God help us make it so! Blessings for your journey!