anticipation

11/09/10 This is not the kind of anticipation that you usually think about...about a child looking forward to opening presents on Christmas morning or Carly Simon singing about a lover in her song, "Anticipation." What I am talking about comes from my breath prayer for the day from Isaiah 65;24, "Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear." God anticipates our prayers, our deepest longings, our hopes, our cries, etc. before we can even put them into words.

Love,
Lynn

good

11/08/10 My breath prayer today comes from Psalm 118, "O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever." In my early morning walk/prayer time, I was impressed that God is good. I know that some people have other images of God--that God is vindictive, angry, petty, mean, unforgiving, etc. But I choose to believe that God is good. I choose to believe that God loves us in spite of what we do sometimes. I believe that because God is good, we who are created in God's own image have the possibility of being good also.

Love,
Lynn

an extra hour

11/7/10 Today is the first day of the annual time from daylight savings to standard time, which means that we got an extra hour over the last day. What to do with an extra hour? I know lots of people, myself included, who wish we had an extra hour every day. Would we use to sleep, to work more, to make love, to make peace, to make trouble? An extra hour....what a gift...what a responsibility!

Love,
Lynn

all saints

11/04/10 This coming Sunday, we celebrate as All Saints' Sunday, a time when we realize that we are a part of the communion of saints, all those who have lived and died and now are a part of the Church Victorious. My breath prayer today talks about the God who gathers all the saints, Luke 20:38, "Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

Love,
Lynn

chesed

11/3/10 My breath prayer today comes from Psalm 145:8, a line that is repeated several times in our Bible, "The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." My perfectionism can really get me down. I see how far short I fall to be loving toward God and toward others. Thank God, literally, thank God, that God loves us with a love that will not let us go, that will not give up, a covenant love, a steadfast love. The word in Hebrew for this kind of love is chesed.

Love,
Lynn

work

11/2/10 My breath prayer for the day comes from a minor OT prophet called Haggai, who has in the 2nd chapter, verse 4, "Take courage, all you people of the lnad, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts." I admit that the older I get, the quicker I tire and the more I consider retirement. But today, I am grateful that I have meaningful work to do. I am well compensated financially for being a senior pastor of a suburban church. Even more I am gratified that I get to make a difference in peoples' lives. The best pay I get is when someone "gets it", when someone understands that they are loved because of what God has done in Jesus Christ. The best pay I get is when Christ shows up in a worship service and He does something that changes folks' hearts, something that was written in the order of worship. I enjoy what I do, and I think I am pretty good at it. Today I am thankful that I get to do holy work.

Love,
Lynn

teamwork

11/1/10 Yesterday, our Stewardship Committee met. We started with lunch and started coming together. We are planning a different kind of stewardship emphasis for 2011. We will be using the resource, "Enough: discovering joy through simplicity and generosity." So as you can see it is not about the budget; it is about helping people get out of the addictive cycle of wanting too much, spending too much, and getting into too much debt. Our committee gave me valuable counsel. It wasn't me telling them what we were going to do. It was me presenting some options and them presenting their opinions. As we talked, we also were placing stick-on messages to the back of the members' name tags that had our church vision statement and our vows as United Methodists--prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. We met for almost 2 hours, but the time flew by. We were a team working together.

Love,
Lynn