January 26th, 2012
Everyone is invited to come to
our Sunday, Feb 19th ‘Fat Tuesday’ Potluck lunch after worship service and enjoy great food (including some special New Orleans dishes) and King Cake (that’s the Mardi Gras part) as we celebrate and eat up all the goodies before Lent begins on Wednesday.
Our Youth leaders are planning a Friday-Saturday Youth work mission trip through our friends at EDGE in Louisville for one of the weekends in October. This would be a great time for our middle school and high schoolers, as well as their parents, to join in a time of work and fun and prayer as we become the hands and feet of Jesus to our community.
Join us during this season of Lent 2009 while we ask just how we are meant to seek God’s guidance for our lives. We can do more than just pray “God, open our eyes” and it is this ‘more’ that we will share in sermon and song and Scripture while we prepare ourselves for God’s triumphant revealing of His ultimate will for our lives in Jesus Christ.
I want to make God more alive to someone else this year.
To all the saints in Christ Jesus in Shiloh United Methodist Church:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Imagine if we were greeted that way as we began our day…as we ran into Kroger’s for last minute groceries…as we opened the door to our house. Sounds wildly improbable, doesn’t it? Admit it, sounds kind of extreme, doesn’t it? Sort of like we thought we were like those New Testament people. The ones we call saints.
Guess what? That is what we’re called to be. Most importantly, it’s what God gives us the power to be. I hope you will be with us in worship with us throughout November as we celebrate the saints in our lives. The people who “made God more alive” to you. We’ll hear stories from the heart of ways saints in this congregation have made each other’s lives richer in love, richer in meaning, richer in laughter and sorrow shared. We’ll also hear stories of times it looked like we were the ones pouring out God’s love, only to find it flowing over into us as well.
The reality of being the church at Shiloh United Methodist, being the saints who’ve loved each other and served God, is that we promise first, our presence and prayers and then, our money and our time. When we miss coming together in worship and fellowship, we miss the vital love that the Spirit of God uses to connect us to each other. It’s not our power that makes us saints to each other: it’s God’s. When we ignore the vital role that money plays in our ability to worship and minister together, we ignore the words of Jesus that where your money is, there your heart is also.
We can hold onto what we have, and find we have less.
Or we can open our hearts, our schedules and our checkbooks…
And find that the ‘someone else’ God is more alive to…is all of us.
Sunday from 10-10:45
Women’s Group: Now studying Liz Curtis Higgs’ Slightly Bad Girls of the Bible. Next up: Joyce Meyer’s Me and My Big Mouth
Small Group: Being Methodist in the Bible Belt, led by Pastor Susan
Sunday School for all children and youth.
Tuesday
Prayer Group from 8:30-10. Prayer and study of Beth Moore’s Psalms of Ascent
Video Study from 7:00-9:00 pm. Boundaries (great food included).
Wednesday from 7:00-8:30. Youth small groups (middle & high school)
Friday from noon-1:30. Luncheon Bible Study, now studying Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World
Saturday: from 7-8:30 am. Men’s Java Group. Now studying Gospel of Matthew (Max Lucado guide).
Tallulah, my pug, was scratching around the back yard this morning, looking like her own version of Pigpen from the old Peanuts cartoon. Her little cloud of dirt surrounded her wherever she went and that’s when I thought, “Boy, do we need rain.” Tallulah’s my dryness barometer and reminds me each day that if my garden is going to get any water, it’ll have to be from the end of my hose. But Tallulah also led me to think about what my spiritual ‘dry’ barometer would be if I had one. While we’ve been talking about Soul Care in our sermon series, I’ve been mulling over dry times in our spiritual lives. These are times when we’re too overwhelmed or distracted to care for our own souls.
What’s your barometer of dryness in your spiritual life? Is it a cloud of cynicism like Pigpen’s cloud of dirt? A wilting of your hope like the end of summer flowers? A drying up of words to speak to God? Mike Yaconelli, in a book called Messy Spirituality, wrote this about our soul life with God:
Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality, not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws, but because we let go of seeking perfection and instead seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God’s being present in the mess of our unfixedness.
When my ‘unfixedness’ threatens to leave me in a cloud of isolation, I’ve learned to find water instead of just hoping for a cloudburst of rain. I’ve learned to tell a close friend how I feel and ask them to pray when my words have dried up. I’ve learned that a psalm, read over and over, in the silence of the evening, can be a long cold drink. I’ve learned that my feelings aren’t facts and just because I feel God has left me dry doesn’t mean God has. If God could lead the Israelites in the wilderness in a cloud of smoke and a pillar of fire, then God can lead us through the dust of long, dry days.
Those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. John 4:14
Pastor Susan