Genesis

New Years is a natural for thinking about the direction of your life. Gyms are packed with resolution keepers. I myself have chosen to read the Clean Food cookbook by Terry Walters. Just today I filled my shopping cart at Forest Hills Foods with new and exotic things like lentils and leeks and millet and organic root vegetables. One of my goals for 2011 is to make friends with healthy food.

This Sunday we began a conversation about core values, and I invited us to do some thinking around two specific questions:

This week I’m preaching about freedom using Acts 16:16-34 as my springboard. In this text, everything is turned upside down and inside out. The people who are assumed to be free are not really free. And the people who are in prison are actually the ones experiencing real freedom. In preparing for this sermon, I’d like to know what freedom means to you.

Our theme for worship this week is joy. A great follow up to Easter if I do say so myself! When I think of joy, the word “unexpected” comes to mind. It isn’t an experience I can orchestrate. It almost always sneaks up on me, which is part of what makes it so great. There have been times in my life when I questioned my capacity for joy.

Pastor Joe Bistayi has the joy and privilege of preaching this week. On Sunday morning, he will stand before you and wrestle with this question from the pulpit. In the meantime, I will add my two cents. First things first, scripture is written in order that we might believe. It is written to inspire and instruct and strengthen our faith as well as to reveal the heart and mind of God.

My parents were swept up in the charismatic renewal movement of the seventies. Catholics gone Pentecostal. It was a passionate romance followed by a quick engagement. An unexpected marriage experienced by many as both exhilarating and intense. As a kid, I remember bits and pieces. Church in ordinary homes. Laying on of hands. Prayers for healing.