Fall Bucket List

Today is the first official day of FALL! It’s a time when hopefully the air starts to cool, the leaves may begin to change, and pumpkin spice is everywhere. It is the one time of year the store shelves are full of pumpkin-spiced-scented candles and the pumpkin/fall décor is lining the aisles. Fall is one of my favorite times of the year. When the season hits, I tend to make a list of what all I want to try and do this fall. Starting with… I love having football on the tv and homemade chili simmering on the stove while curled up on the couch under my cozy blanket. It brings me back to some of my favorite childhood memories and always gives me that warm homey feeling. What gives you that childhood warm homey feeling? Is it baking chocolate chip cookies or making a hot bubbling apple pie with a family member and then cooling it down with the cold vanilla ice cream? Or is it getting to pick out a caramel-covered apple and wash it down with hot apple cider at a Fall Festival?

When we lived in Indiana many years ago, we only had two of our three kids at the time (the third one wasn’t born yet), we would have a family day and take them to one of our local farms that put on a Harvest Festival every year. The kids would have so much fun laughing and running around playing the different games they had set up, winning treats to take home (actually they never made it home because they would eat them there), attempting the different mazes they put together, and then finishing up with the hayride that takes you to the pumpkin patch where you get to pick out your perfect pumpkin to take home and carve with your family in preps for Halloween. Before we would take the kids out to trick or treat, we would light up their little pumpkins that were on the porch and the joy and excitement on their faces will be one I will never forget.

Family memories are amazing to make, and I will forever be grateful to the people who put on these festivals every year for families to enjoy. This is one reason why I love to get involved with our church’s annual Fall Festival every year. Becoming a part of something for not only my church family but all our families out in the community brings so much joy and happiness. Knowing that I have become a small piece in helping make memories for these children and their families that they will hold onto for a lifetime is such a blessing.  Our fall festival takes a lot of pieces to put together and organize each year. I am blessed that God has put together such an amazing crew to work with and we still need more pieces to make it amazing. What’s on your fall bucket list this year? Would you like to be a part of making family memories that they hold onto for years to come? If so, please feel free to contact the church office so we can get you added to our crew! Now time for me to start planning the theme for my trunk this year to pass out candy to the smiling faces.

Jen Neely is our Preschool Assistant Director. She enjoys cooking, being artsy, and raising her three amazing children.

Time

Time. We have too much of it when we don’t want it, but we never have enough when we need it.  Time, for most of us, always seems to be against us.  It steals away those moments with loved ones; those few and far between minutes of relaxation are gone in a blink.  Our youth is gone before we know it and our time on earth is ticking away second by second. James tells us that “you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14).  This used to be my dad’s favorite verse to use from the pulpit. It reminds us that there is an urgency we have to live a life of faithfulness and the promise that our worldly troubles are temporary.

This kind of makes one think about their life: what they’ve done, where they are going.  Hopefully it encourages you to make the best of the unknown number of years you have.  Hopefully there will be times of joy and laughter, and equally important sadness and tears; for these are the times we grow the most.  Time is something we have little of and can never gain.  Now, this isn’t a blog meant to depress you. My hope is that you will come to find the sweetness of a second, the beautiful fragrance of an hour, or the refreshment of a minute.

But does it end there?  Is that it?  All this time we’ve been savoring the seconds and trying to do the best we can in life, and now it’s just the end?  Far from it, the only thing that has ended is the beginning… the beginning of eternity.  May we recognize that our trust is put into the hands of God, and He will raise us up to be with Him forever.  Time can take away our life on this small blue planet, but our God has bigger and better things for us; things that time cannot wither.  However, we have a job here, to be done right now.  And no matter the journey you take through life, the ups and downs you’ll face, always remember this is just the beginning.

“But from this earth, this grave, this dust, my God shall raise me up I trust” – Even Such Is Time by Sir Walter Raleigh

Loose Handles

There’s a handle on my desk that has been loose for months now. I don’t open that door very often but every time I do I feel the handle wiggle a bit, and I can hear the screws on the back side hitting the wood. The sad thing is, I have a screwdriver less than 10 feet away from me that would fix it. Actually, give me a minute…

It just took me less than ten seconds to fix this handle that’s been bugging me for a long time. I could have addressed this problem many times over the past couple of months but instead I just dealt with the minor inconvenience and put off the repair. I wish I was making this story up just as an illustration but this actually happened. It took procrastinating on writing a blog for me to fix a problem that never should have gone on this long.

But how many other things do we have in our life that we are putting off because it’s inconvenient? My mind immediately goes to the dishes and trash that need to be taken care of, but it goes way beyond the menial tasks. It’s the broken relationships that need to be mended, the people who are hurting that need to be comforted, the lonely who need to be talked to. So many of the things in our life that need to be addressed deal with other people and we put it off because it almost always means admitting we were wrong or that we have to embrace the uncomfortableness of it.

But there’s also the spiritual side. We know we should pray, but we put it off because we’re too busy. We know we should read our Bibles but there’s never the time. We should volunteer or tithe but… In the words of Paul, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”.  There aren’t easy answers, but perhaps there is a first answer. Do the small things first. It took ten seconds to fix a handle and I put it off for months as it occupied entirely too much of my head space. There are small things that you can do right now, and once they are done will make it easier (though still not easy) to handle the larger things in your life.

Confidence, Optimism, and Gratitude

I don't know why, but I am always amazed by the creativity that God uses to teach me life lessons.

Last week at the thrift store, on a busy afternoon, while I was doing a spectacular job of unsuccessfully managing 3 crises at the same time, a volunteer alerted me to a situation in the front of the store. I went to investigate. A young couple had been experiencing car trouble on their way to a prospective job in southern Florida. They were stranded with no money to purchase the auto part needed to fix their car and continue on their trip.

I assigned the man the job of modeling a recliner that we had for sale in the store, and took the lady with me to go and purchase the auto part. It was not far away, and traffic was unusually light. And this is how my lesson began.

I am always impressed at the amount of information one will divulge given very little prompting. I soon learned of their financial struggles, family relationships, chronic medical conditions, failed marriages, times of drug use, and now years of sobriety. What impressed me the most was how she told me that God had been with her through every bit of this. The level of confidence in her relationship with God was awesome. God was with her always, through thick and thin. And she had a level of optimism about her future life events that was amazing. She said that she and God had come through all this together, and she was excited about where they would go next. God had great things in store for her just around the corner.

After purchasing the part, we returned to the store to pick up her partner, and then go to their car, which had been left in a local parking lot. They both were very appreciative of the help. After leaving them to fix their car, I returned back to the store to see what trouble could cause there. That I am good at doing. Later in the afternoon, the lady came back into the store. They had driven their car back to say thank you. She had tears in her eyes, as she thanked me for doing something that I did not need to do. She then gave me a gift, which she stated had sentimental value to her. I told her that was not necessary. She corrected me, saying that she accepted my gift, and now had this gift from her to me. I said thank you. And for a brief moment was speechless.

I had spent a small amount of time with this person, and yet I felt that I had learned volumes. I learned about having confidence in a relationship with God who never leaves me, about being optimistic about my future life events with God, and about being grateful for what God provides me along the way.

And all this from a very unassuming lady who had car trouble. Awsome.

The Body Of Christ

I have to confess that I am historically bad at not asking for help or delegating and trying to do things myself. For fear of inconveniencing others, or maybe insecurities about getting things done “right,” I have always tried to just do things myself. I’ve tended to lean towards the old adage the bad guy from Fifth Element said, “If you want something done, do it yourself” (actually I think Napoleon Bonaparte said it first, but I heard it first from a space movie).

I think that does a disservice, however, to how the church should function. In fact, that type of thinking goes against how Scripture discusses the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul makes it clear that the body of Christ should function as that… a body. One part cannot hide what it’s doing from the other, nor can it function without the other body parts. Everything has to work together for the body to function. This is true of the church. Paul presses the point that God is the one that has put the body together, therefore there should be no division on the body, and all parts should have equal concern for the other.

We do a disservice to what God has ordained as the body of Christ when we are only concerned with the little parts that we are responsible for. Certainly, we should all do our part with diligence, grace, and hard work; however, it is done for the purpose so that the entire part is honored.

I look back at the busy summer our children and youth ministries had. I can’t help but think how much time and effort it took from so many volunteers/workers to organize and put together our Youth Camp in June and our VBS in July. Through our hard work and efforts, we saw over 20 young lives surrender themselves to Christ this summer. The misconception would be that this is somehow “my” victory, but that would be incredibly pious and a severe disservice to how the body of Christ worked together to pull off these initiatives. I am but one piece to the puzzle. It took an entire body working together to achieve this victory. Drivers to Orange Beach, cooks that organized meals, folks praying during service and at home, donations to camp, those that bought VBS supplies, VBS group leaders, VBS rotation leaders, those that prepared snacks, our VBS director… - this victory belongs to all of us; it belongs to the body of Christ.

All of us have strengths and weaknesses, and I that’s done on purpose. Our strengths, and the gifts God has given us, are there to help us build up the body of Christ and further advance the purpose of the church. Our weaknesses, and the gifts we lack, teach us a lesson that is just as valuable. Our weaknesses remind us to rely on other parts of the body. They remind us to be humble and vulnerable. To allow others to pick up where we cannot take the body of Christ alone. That is the beauty of the church; to remind us that we all have a part to play and a responsibility to rely on one another.

That’s something that can be hard for someone like me to swallow. That means I have to get out of my comfort zone and ask for help when I need it. It means I must remember that any ministry that wants to be “successful” in God’s eyes has to be done in the context of Christ’s body, not by some “super minister” that does so many wonderful things. If I all into that trap, then I would end up being the one that is glorified, not God.

I pray that all of us take these words of Paul’s to heart and remember,

“…there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” – 1 Corinthians 12:25-26