Advantages of Joining Our Choir

1. You never have to worry about what to wear.
2. You have excellent seats and are assured a reserved seat for Christmas and Easter.
3. From your advantageous seat, you can smile at, gawk at, ignore and otherwise enjoy the rest of the people in the congregation.
4. The pastor is almost always looking the other way.
4a. You can fantasize about a target painted on pastor's bald head, and shooting spitwads at the bullseye.
5. You're in a wonderful spot to see visitors and new members.
6. and truly best: You're a leader in the worship experience.

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How to Be a Friend

.....Two friends were once walking through the desert, but at some point during the journey, they fell into an argument, and one friend slapped the other in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, he wrote in the sand: Today my best friend slapped me in the face.

.....They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but his friend saved him. After he recovered from the near drowning, he wrote on a stone: Today my best friend saved my life.

.....The friend who slapped, and then saved his best friend asked, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now, you write on a stone. Why?"

.....The other friend replied: "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in the sand, where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away, but when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."

Learn to write your hurts in the sand,
and to carve your blessings in stone.

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A Grief Observed

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I just haven't been feeling well for awhile. Though there may be other issues at hand, I've realized that much of it is a time of passing through grief.Of course, we've faced some deaths that have made us sad as a community and as a church. And then, serious illnesses among friends and church family distress us. That's all grief in a very real way. Those things grieve us because they indicate change that has come, or change that may be coming. It all has to do with relationships, and change.The deep grief I've been feeling is not as final or big as the griefs of death or grave illness. But it does have to do with relationships and changes in them. When a relationship deepens, we feel a lot of joy. But when we feel a cooling, a distancing in a relationship, that's painful. It, too, is real grief. My problem is, I feel the coolness, the distance, but I'm having a hard time coming up with the reasons for the change. And so, there is grief. Five particular relationships have seemed broken. Thankfully, one was cleared up as we tracked down the source of misunderstanding. But four still seem strained, so the heart aches.Perhaps this has happened to you as well. I don't know how you dealt/deal with it, but I'm working at reminding myself: There are only two eyes in whose gaze I long to see approval, acceptance, and friendship ... and they are not in any human's head! Only in the loving gaze of Jesus Christ will I find what I truly need and long for. I will accept friendship as temporal, ephemeral, as "good for as long as it lasts," but for the long term, I know it is in Christ Alone that I live. And in Him is joy, and not grief.

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