For those of us praying for the global economy....by Max Lucado

You Have Our Attention, Lord
A prayer by Max Lucado - October 2008

Our friends lost their house
The co-worker lost her job
The couple next door lost their retirement
It seems that everyone is losing their footing
This scares us. This bailout with billions.
These rumblings of depression.
These headlines: ominous, thunderous -
“Going Broke!” “Going Down!” “Going Under!”
“What's Next?”
What is next?
We’re listening. And we’re admitting:
You were right.
You told us this would happen.
You shot straight about loving stuff and worshipping money.
Greed will break your heart, You warned.
Money will love you and leave you.
Don’t put your hope in riches that are so uncertain.
You were right. Money is a fickle lover and we just got dumped.
We were wrong to spend what we didn’t have.
Wrong to neglect prayer and ignore the poor.
Wrong to think we ever earned a dime.
We didn’t.
You gave it.
And now, tell us Father, are You taking it?
We’re listening. And we’re praying.
Could you make something good out of this mess?
Of course You can. You always have.
You led slaves out of slavery,
Built temples out of ruins,
Turned stormy waves into a glassy pond and water into sweet wine.
This disorder awaits your order.
So do we.
Through Christ, Amen

I'm trying to figure out how to post a pdf file - but it keeps coming up funky, so i'll just give you the link.
http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/Provocations.pdf

Go to chapter 26 "Neighbor Love" - it's on page 122 (by the adobe reader's count)

This is a chapter from a book by the tile “Provocations”, a collection of spiritual writings by the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. It talks about the command of Jesus to “Love your neighbor” – and we’ll be talking about that this coming Sunday!

I Hope you enjoy it….

Peace and Love in Jesus' Name!

Psalm from "the Future of Our Church" on Sun. 10/12

Hey everybody!

Here is the "mad-lib" psalm that the youth made during the "Future of Our Church" segment of last Sunday's worship service. The parts in the [brackets] are the youth's contributions to the psalm.

Enjoy!

Psalm 3.14159265358979323846…

a psalm of mad libs

O Lord,
You are [good].
and you are [BIG].
and you always [care for us].

When [my Dad dropped me on the head],
You were there.
When [I fell asleep in my oatmeal],
You were there.
When [I learned new stuff at school],
You were there.

[Thank you, God]!
Hallelujah!

Blogs for Faith UMC?!?!?!?

I know what you may be thinking; this Church doesn't even have the internet yet and a good number (if not most) of our members do not use computers. So what business do we have blogging?

Well here's an idea that I had - those of you who ARE reading this and answering my posts - how about you take these questions that I'm asking you and bring them to the rest of the congregation?

You might be surprised at the great stories you'll hear!

Go ahead and give it a try! Present these questions to some folks who you know can't get to this blog page. Send their replies to me and I'll post them.

This could be a great way to get to know more about your fellow Church members and to deepen your relationships with them!

What's Important to You at Faith UMC?

Some questions for the people of Faith UMC (and anyone else for that matter...)

1) What are the top two reasons you come to this church?

2) Which of Faith UMC's ministries do you think is most important and why?

3) What would you most like to see done within the next 3 months at Faith UMC? 6 months? Year? and Why?