Quick Sunday Reflections

What a long weekend. WOW!!

Saturday I was at church from 10 am until 8 pm, then went over my sermon.
Sunday I was at church from 8 am until 3:30, then 5:45 until 8pm. Long days, but good days.

I have come to the conclusion I need to go to the doctor tomorrow. My cold, sore throat, etc. just is not going away, and I am assuming with my limited doctor knowledge, I have a sinus infection. I almost didn't get through today's sermon. My throat became dry and I felt like there was a knife in there. Fun feeling.

I guess I can attribute all of that to eating celery. WOW!! Nobody has come forward to confess their deed of putting celery on the pulpit. What a great idea, though. I was very fortunate I was sucking on the last remnants of a cough drop, which helped kill some, only some of the celery flavor. I tasted it all through worship. Thanks to Jeanne for the mint after worship. That helped!!

We had a good weekend with Doug and his family. Doug has wonderful talents and skills and gifts in music. I am excited and hopeful the church will vote in Doug's favor to come as our associate pastor. He will focus on worship and I believe two key areas are visitation and assimilation. They are similar yet very different. I will talk about them and the needs I see at our business meeting on the 20th of February. Joshua and Zachary had a good time hanging out with Doug and Beth Anne's daughter, Vicki Jo. Paul, their son, was a trooper in playing and letting Zachary and Vicki Jo take rides on his back.

I was so impressed with the song the praise team did this week, a Mercy Me song, "word of God, speak." It was so perfect for the message about Christian meditation. Great pick. Next week is silence and solitude and it will fit for that as well.

On the doctoral front, I'm just putting all this in one long post, I am writing, actually taking a break the wrapping up. It is 12:10 pm. I now have about 86 pages written. I think I will have about 6-10 more pages, then off it goes into the mail on Wednesday.

I cannot tell you how much this project has meant to me. I am learning more and more about myself and about God. It is changing me, and I want it to change our church. I feel so strongly about this. We just cannot go through the motions of trying this Spiritual Disciplines, we must take them and make them part of who we are so we become more and more like Christ, it becomes our nature, not second nature, but we live and breath and exude Christ to the world, and somehow the world is different because of who we are in Christ. When we hear the promises of Christ, they become real to us, they are no longer idle wishes of peace and rest and love and joy and grace . . . instead, we live them and help change the world, one person at a time. I feel like I'm preaching, but I believe in this so much. It's who I am and who we must be in order to experience what Christ offers us, and to help the world experience His joy and love.

Okay, sermon's over. Back to writing!!