Featuring Rob’s sermon from Sunday and links to all our content!
Featuring Aaron’s sermon from Sunday, a link to our recent blog post from the Mission, Vision, and Values Team, as well as links to several of our content clearinghouses for all your SJC content needs!
Featuring Rob’s sermon from Sunday and links to all our content!
Featuring Aaron’s sermon from Sunday, and a reflection from Steve Garnaas-Holmes shared out by Anne. Also links to several of our content clearinghouses for all your SJC content needs!
Fiscal responsibility and accountability to empower our mission. This week, we will be looking back at this tumultuous year with key members of our leadership team. Today is the fourth of this week’s annual meeting offerings. Please RSVP for our community zoom on 1/31 at 9am.
Fiscal responsibility and accountability to empower our mission. This week, we will be looking back at this tumultuous year with key members of our leadership team. Today is the third of this week’s annual meeting offerings. Please RSVP for our community zoom on 1/31 at 9am.
Fiscal responsibility and accountability to empower our mission. This week, we will be looking back at this tumultuous year with key members of our leadership team. Today is the second of this week’s annual meeting offerings. Please RSVP for our community zoom on 1/31 at 9am.
Fiscal responsibility and accountability to empower our mission. This week, we will be looking back at this tumultuous year with key members of our leadership team. Today is the first of this week’s annual meeting offerings. Please RSVP for our community zoom on 1/31 at 9am.
Once I accepted this little bat for what it was, I was able to close my eyes and sleep! I slept that night better than I had in a long long time. Every night until I left, I would hear the little bat come into my house, I would say a little greeting to it, then drift into a pleasant and restful night.
The state of our society today, however, seems to thrust this familiar verse into our everyday lives in a new and more immediate way. The patterns of our lives have been disrupted and short term concerns and worries crowd out seemingly all else. We perceive novel challenges at every turn. We have hopes for positive outcomes, but assurance seems very hard to come by. Do we have faith? Can we have faith?
"How do you stand it ?"a close friend asked me not long ago. It is not always easy. Some days my tears flow freely, especially during the holiday season. I know I am not alone So many, maybe most of us, have suffered great losses of one type or the other during this time of the COVID-19 and in our lives. Through all our sufferings, God is with us. I have experienced this reality many times in my life. This I, with
certainty, know.
The psychologists who work with resiliency point to a range of other resources that contribute to resiliency, many of which involve ways and degrees of connection and community, apart from the attributes of the individual. When those can be strengthened and enlarged, both the individual and the community are more resilient. I pause at this – doesn't this echo strongly a message we hear so often at St John's, that the work of the church is community?
At the age of 89, she was carried out of the fire at her retirement home on the shoulder of a firefighter and declared ‘My, my, I will never forget that if I live to be a hundred!’ Nannie didn’t quite make it to one hundred, nearly though, and I was so blessed to have known her into my young adulthood.
The passage is central to my understanding of God and to my call as a beloved child of God, a unique work of God’s hands, molded in divine love. It tells me that as a created, thinking being, I am not yet fully formed. It helps me to understand that NOT knowing all of the answers to my big questions Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? That it is more than fine, it fact it’s may be my destiny to not fully understand the nature of God. To continue to play and wrestle with that understanding throughout my lifetime is a mission in itself.
