Finished the First Year of Course of Study

Well, I made it through my first year of classes for the United Methodist Church at Duke University. The last morning I took some time to go into the Duke Chapel and get a few photos. It really is an impressive place. The vaulted ceilings, the arches, the stained glass windows, the quiet echoes; all set an atmosphere of the Holy.  It is such a contrast to our modern, utilitarian churches, that can be easy mistaken for a theatre or gymnasium. When you walk through these doors, you have no doubt that you're in church. Though there is no sign, no one speaks aloud, only whispers.

 

Our last class of the year was Pastoral Care. We had the good fortune or better yet divine blessing to have the outgoing director of Course of Study, Rev. Nathan Kirkpatrick, to teach our class. When I attended my first class back in September, I was told the he had a love for local pastors and that he had our back. Several people came up and told me how jealous they were that we had him teaching our class. This was my first real time of being able to sit, talk. listen, and learn from  him. When he was teaching, you could tell what things he was  passionate about, you could see it in his eyes. It was really good class.

These are some of the members of our class. The eight of us were is Licensing School 2008 together.   http://mountairyjournal.blogspot.com/2008/06/licensing-school-pics.html   We're all Local Pastors serving around the state of Virginia. We will all get together at Annual Conference in a couple of months.

 

When I was driving home from Duke on Saturday afternoon, I heard this song on the radio. I had heard it many times before, but this time was different. I can't really explain it, you'll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, I just wanted to post it on here for you to hear. It just seemed to sum up what I was feeling when I was heading home from my first year at school.

Wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Zhu

On Saturday night Gordon Goh, who I worked with at the hospital for over 20 years, called and said he had a big favor to ask of me. Gordon attends the Chinese Church at Beulah Baptist Church. It seems that there was a couple, who also attend the Chinese Church, and they wanted to get married on Tuesday, three days away. 

I agreed to officiate the wedding. I had no questions about the couples status, preparedness for marriage, or faith. I know Dr. and Mrs. Wu, who pastor and teach the Chinese Church. I also know that Dr. Wu was giving the bride in marriage and that he would never do that if they were not well prepared. It helps to know those in leadership and their standards. The bride's name was Suzanne and the groom was Frank.

On Sunday I got a call from the couple and was told that they were planning a rehearsal on Monday evening. They asked if I would be able to attend. Since I wasn't sure how you could have a rehearsal otherwise, I figured that I had better show up. I seems that the bride's name was HaiYing Sun and groom's name was ChangJiang Zhu. I needed to do some pronunciation practicing. Their selection of the day for the wedding was the anniversary of the day they met two years ago.

When Joanne and I got there on Monday, we found that they had decorated the sanctuary with a boat load of flowers. The entire isle that the bride would walk down was lined with flower rope. The platform had a flower draped arch and potted flower on the railing in front of the choir loft. All the decorations were impressive, since they had already told us that besides the Bride and Groom, and Joanne and me, they were expecting seven guests. They wanted a small wedding, but not an underdone wedding.

On Tuesday evening, the groom asked if we could start a bit late. I told him it was his wedding and we'd start when he was ready. Apparently, he had left something at home and had to run and get it. So we began at 7:30 rather than 7:00, not a big deal. Now, we had made a few planned modifications in the service. First was that they both had something they wanted to read to each other. Second was that when they lit the unity candle in place of music I would read a scripture. I also printed out their names and placed them on each page of the service, just so I could get them correct.

When the time came for them to read what they had prepared, it went great. They probably could have written their own service. When HaiYing was reading hers, she read 1 Corinthians 13, the Love chapter. That was the scripture that I had planned to read during their lighting of the unity candle. Fortunately I had prepared another scripture. So, I slipped one into the back of the book and the other into it's place.

 

The service went very well. Especially since we had emailed the parts that they would be saying to them the night before so they could practice the English pronunciations. I was told later that I did a good job on the names, I do hope so.

 

 After the service ChangJiang and HaiYing, Mr. and Mrs. Zhu, told us that they had made dinner reservations at Golden Corral for everyone. Golden Corral is a buffet type restaurant, which was good since we could all get what we wanted. But, by the time we arrived at the restaurant it was 8:30 and they were scheduled to close at 9:00. The manager said not to worry, everything would remain available until we were finished. The man cooking the steaks stayed until we were done and the waiter was continually checking on us. I do not know very many restaurants that would have been so gracious. Kudos to Golden Corral on Wards Road in Lynchburg. If you get a chance to eat there, please, tell them thank you for what they did for the newlyweds.

 

ChangJiang and HaiYing Zhu, may your life together be richly blessed.

Final Tally

A final update on our Haiti Relief Program. We collected $390 to send to the missionaries in Haiti and a good load of items to go to "Gleaning for the World" to be sent to Haiti. We want to thank everyone who contributed financially or with items to be sent. Please continue to pray for Haiti and those who minister there. The news and television have moved on to "more pressing" things, but the suffering goes on and the needs are still there. It is time for the church to arise and step out.

Arsenic and Old Lace

A little over a week ago, Joanne and I went to see Brian Daniels perform in the play "Arsenic and Old Lace" in Danville.

Brian played a character named Teddy, who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt. He ran around shouting "Bully!" and thinking he was digging the Panama Canal, when he was actually digging graves in the cellar for he sisters. He was outstanding! He and the entire cast put on an excellent production.

You might say that Brian's portrayal was off the ground. We had a great time.

Trying Something New (at least new for us)

 For Christmas Courtney and Dave gave me a digital voice recorder to use for my classes at Duke. I just can't take notes as fast as I once could and I needed some help. If I could figure out how to cut out the class chatter and discussion, so that I only had the lecture recorded it would help. Hopefully I'll learn how to do that as time goes on.
 

It seemed that there should be some other way to use this cool little device. We decided that we would try to record the Sunday sermons on the recorder. Then I could take it home, download it onto the computer, and then burn it onto a CD to be taken to those homebound and in nursing homes or given those who missed that Sunday. Not that I think my sermons are so noteworthy as to be saved and passed on, but it seemed that it might be a good way to keep folks connected to the church and let them know we haven't forgotten about them.

  My first attempt resulted in a blank CD being given out. I am definitely not the most tech savvy person you will ever meet. But, I've figured out what I did wrong and the next CD will have two Sundays on it. We started with Sunday the 21st, the first Sunday of Lent. The one problem is distribution. By the time I take it home, download and makes the copies, its the next Sunday before we get them delivered. So we end up a week behind. We'll have to work on that. We're also not sure if everyone has a CD player at home, but that can be easily remedied.

I know larger churches have sound systems that can record the service and CD copiers that can turn out dozens of CDs in the time it takes me to make one copy. But, there is no reason a small church can't get the job done, too. Maybe in the future we'll update our sound system and include some of things that will help us be a bit more efficient. For now, what matters is that we keep our people connected to the church and that they know that they have not been forgotten.

Haiti Relief Program

The day for our Haiti Relief Program finally arrived, after having been canceled for snow.  I had sent out 15 emails to area United Methodist Churches and 55 letters to area Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Church of God, Pentecostal Holiness, Catholic, and Non-Denominational churches. Joanne and I had spent hours upon hours loading photos onto the PowerPoint, a total of 578 photos were used. In addition Joanne had found 2 hymns and a Call to Worship reading that were specific for Haiti and the disaster there, which loaded on the program. We had arranged to use a projector from Janeen Abbot and a laptop computer from Josh Dalton, since I currently have neither. We got everything together and arrived at St. Andrews UMC an hour ahead to make sure we got it all set up before anyone arrived.

Our first problem was that our PowerPoint, that we had loaded on a jump drive, would not work on Josh's laptop. When Katie Nuckols arrived she tried to help Joanne get it running, but nothing happened. The only thing we could think might cause the problem was that our computer used Microsoft Vista and his used Microsoft XP. So we called Donna Adams, knowing that she was coming to the program, to see if she had a laptop that used XP and fortunately she did.

 

 Joanne and Donna switched everything over to Donna's computer, loaded the PowerPoint, and it popped up on the screen beautifully. So we hurried to connect it to the projector and get the program, already late by now, started. But alas, Donna's computer would not hook into the projector with the cables we had for the projector. We tried everything; we pulled random cables out to try, we even connected Donna's laptop to Josh's and then Josh's laptop to the projector. Nothing worked. Talk about a tech disaster! Finally, we decided that since Donna's laptop had a very large screen, we would turn the screen around to the congregation and have them watch it on the laptop.

Oh, did I forget to mention that we only had 25 people come for the program? Everyone there was from our 3 churches, except for one guest. So it wasn't too difficult to have everyone move close to the front and middle of the church to see the screen. We did have to skip the hymns and reading since the print was too small to see. 

We had pictures of Haiti before the earthquake, that we had taken when we had visited there. Courtney and Dave had been missionaries in Haiti for 3 years. We showed slides of our first two grandchildren, Thomas and Taisie, when they were very small, who were adopted in Haiti. We also had some pictures of 3 teams of missionaries and the work they do in Haiti. We were trying to raise funds to send them. We finished with photos of the earthquake and relief effort since the quake.

 

After we finished the PowerPoint part of the program we had a Q&A time. Joanne and I showed some of the art items we had brought back from our visits to Haiti, when Courtney and Dave were missionaries there.

We had asked people to bring something that might be donated to "Gleaning for the World" for Haiti relief and any money received would go directly to the missionaries in Haiti. We had folks drop their monetary donations in an old washtub and we placed all relief items at the front of the church. We received $140 and a truck load of items.

I want to thank Janeen for making the projector available, Josh and Donna for volunteering their laptops, Brian Daniels for taking pictures, Joanne for all her work on the Powerpoint, and everyone there that evening for their patience with our technical difficulties.

 

We finally finished the whole program over an hour later than we had planned. We got home around 10:30 Sunday night. We crashed.

When I finally got around to reading my email on Monday, I found one from our district Superintendent, Larry Davies. He sends an email out every Sunday morning to all the pastors in the district with a prayer and word for us.  I usually don't get to read them until after services on Sunday, since we usually leave the house by 7:30 in the morning and the email comes out around that time. I wish I could have had this one before the program on Sunday evening. It went like this:

"I've had a few computer problems this week. I finally gave up this morning and opened up another one. I guess I'm fortunate; I had another computer to turn to.

Computer problems for me often represent life itself. Things go along pretty smoothly until there is a glitch.  That glitch in a computer can go instantly from smooth to disaster or at least so it seems at the time.

It's all a matter of perspective.

After you step back and look around you realize. Disaster might be a little bit too strong a word. After all, the world is still spinning. I still have a job. There is food in the fridge. I will still go to work and life will go on pretty much as it has.

More importantly, God still loves me and I can rest assured that grace is still a huge part of God's plan for my life.

So today, I'm praying that you will appreciate the gift of perspective. In the midst of your church concerns over finances, growth and other important areas, I pray for God's perspective for you.

Perspective calms the nerves and provides the proper focus. Perspective reminds you that God is in control... not you or me for that matter.

This morning, I am praying that your perspective is centered on God.

God bless, Larry Davies"

I had lost my perspective, I lost focus. God was in control and I obviously was not. The people that were there were the people God wanted there. We still collected a truck load of items for "Gleaning for the World" and some money for the missionaries. I had forgotten the lesson of the fish and loaves. I was the disciple looking at the situation and not liking what I saw. I can easily imagine Father smiling as He watched His frantic children trying to make things work, while He was welcoming those He had personally invited, and we wondered where everyone was. Often God's lessons are embarassing when we finally realize that we have just been taught, clandestine teaching. I have repented and am hoping to do better next time. I am sure there will be a next time.

Lent

Ash Wednesday is the start of the Lenten journey of 40 weekdays (Monday through Saturday) that takes the church to the eve of Easter. We had our service at St. Andrews UMC on the 17th of February. We had a time of scripture reading, singing, a short lesson, and communion. This year is unique in that Ash Wednesday had Communion and Easter falls on the first Sunday of April and we will also have Communion. Now, I don't know about you, but for me bookending Lent with Communion is a special gift. This is going to be a very interesting Lenten season.

Sundays celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, the six Sundays that occur during Lent are not counted as part of the 40 days of Lent, and are referred to as the Sundays in Lent.  The number 40 is connected with many biblical events, but especially with the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness preparing for His ministry by facing the temptations that could lead him to abandon his mission and calling.  This season of the year is equal only to the Season of Advent in importance in the Christian year, and is part of the second major grouping of Christian festivals and sacred time that includes Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost.

The color used in the sanctuary for most of Lent is purple, red violet, or dark violet .  These colors symbolize both the pain and suffering leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus as well as the suffering of humanity and the world under sin.  Purple is also the color of royalty, and so anticipates through the suffering and death of Jesus the coming resurrection and hope of newness that will be celebrated in the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Lent has traditionally been marked by penitential prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  Christian churches that observe Lent focus on it as a time of prayer, especially penance, repenting for failures and sin as a way to focus on the need for God’s grace.  It is really a preparation to celebrate Easter, and the resurrected life that Christians live and hope for.

Many modern Protestants consider the observation of Lent to be a choice, rather than an obligation. They may decide to give up a favorite food or drink (e.g. chocolate, alcohol) or activity (e.g. going to the movies, playing video games) for Lent, or they may instead decide to take on a Lenten discipline such as devotions, volunteering for charity work, and so forth.
  

In addition to the service we passed out Lenten devotionals supplied by the Society of Saint Andrew.  http://www.endhunger.org/  We used these last year and they were very well received and used by the churches. I encouraged everyone to use this as a preparation during Lent. I have found that I have such a busy life that if I don't use all the resources that I can find to prepare my heart before Easter or Christmas, I get to that special day carrying the load of my daily life and missing what God had for me.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who experiences this. So I encourage you to do whatever you can to prepare yourself for what God has prepared for you this Lenten season.

 

 

Valentine's Day Sunday Sermon

This was our first Sunday back at church after having two Sundays snowed out. I thought it was special that we got back together on Valentine's Day.

The scripture we used today was John 21:15-17, where Jesus asks Peter, "Do you love me?". The title of the sermon was "Who Do You Love?". When asked "Do you love me?" there is a question contained in it that says "If you don't love me, who do you love?" On a day when we celebrate love and that special relationship, I thought we should consider both questions.

I wanted an intro that would get the attention. I found a song and read the lyrics to start the sermon. It got some laughs, some smiles, and a few confused looks. Joanne just shook her head and looked at the floor.



I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire,


I got a cobra snake for a necktie


A brand new house on the road side,


And it's a-made out of rattlesnake hide


Got a band new chimney put on top,


And it's a-made out of human skull


Come on take a little walk with me baby,


And tell me who do you love?


Who do you love?


Who do you love?

Happy Valentine's Day. I love Jesus. Who do you love?

Flashback

 

This is a photo of the 8th grade science Club, Boonesboro HS '65-66, just before the high school was closed leaving only the elementary classes there.

Seated at desks: Garnett Scott, Kerry Hudnall

Standing and seated on counter: John Ramsey, Jim Martin, Eddie Tyree, Butch Surber, Arnold Little, Gary Templeton, Steve Allen, Charles Johnson, and Mr. Baker

stollen from fb/J Martin

It Keeps Snowing and We Keep Rescheduling

Well we had about 12 inches of snow last Friday into Saturday and ended up canceling our Sunday services and our Haiti Relief Program for the evening of the 31st. I was pretty bummed about having to put it off, but Courtney reminded me that they would still be needing help for a long time. We have rescheduled the Haiti Relief program for the 21st of February at 6:00 PM at St. Andrews UMC. I hope you will either be able to join us or at least consider supporting the missionaries that we have noted. The needs continue to be desperate and the work being done seems beyond what mere humans can do, yet it gets done.


Please take the time to looks at the ministries of the 3 missionary couples from the previous blog entry, look at the photos they have provided. It will break your heart and touch you in ways I can't explain. It's not easy stuff to look at, but you'll never see this on the evening news. I'm going to put a few raw videos from the Heartline Clinic in Haiti, These are our brothers and sisters injured and rendering aid. We tend to have short attention spans and the news channels seem to change to whats news that day. We mustn't forget that the need remains. Keep praying.











Pray for the people of Haiti, pray for those delivering aid and relief.