Link: http://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-local_coldweather_0104jan04,0,553152.story?track=rss

A GIANT thank you to the entire True North team and members who came out Sunday evening and served a wonderful meal of meatloaf, roasted potatoes, cabbage, and black-eyed peas.  79 guests were fed and cared for by the staff of H.E.L.P. and Night's Welcome as well as our own True North members. All were very appreciative.

Also, John led a Bible study for the guests at St. Mark's UMC on Monday evening. When asked how it went he merely responded "Jesus was present with us tonight".

Thank you to everybody!

This week there will be no official True North worship service. Instead, True North team members and congregants have the opportunity to serve the community - to be the light to a darkened people ... to be the hands and feet of Christ.

St. Mark's is hosting the homeless this coming week for Night's Welcome and Sunday True North will be serving the meal to the guests as well providing clean-up. What an opportunity.

Please come join us - I know that you'll meet Christ somewhere in the FLC this Sunday night.

I know that I said we wouldn't do Christmas at True North but guess what - we are going to do Christmas at True North. This Sunday will be our service of the celebration of the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ.  I have to admit that I've never really thought of Jesus Christ as God before - I've always thought "Jesus Christ? Why he's the son of God".

This is the first year that I've developed a broader thought of the immaculate conception and the birth of God. This is the first year that I've thought about the vast love that God has for mankind. God sacrificed so much to justify and redeem a fallen creation; how mind boggling is that?

So, on Sunday evening True North will share in the Christmas experience. I am anxious to see in what direction John will be headed.

Oh and just a heads up - there will not be a regular worship service on Sunday, January 2nd. True North will be practicing the tenets of the Are You Ready for What Comes Next series ... we will be serving dinner to between 70 and 80 homeless individuals with the St. Mark's who is hosting Night's Welcome. Come join us - I guarantee that you'll experience God that night!

Peace to all,
memonica

I was sitting here thinking about the Matthew 13:31 and 32 passage that John will be preaching from this coming Sunday, the Parable of the Mustard Seed. A paraphrase for you would be that God's Kingdom is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, and yet when planted grows into a large tree that is tall and immense and eagles will nest in its branches. What an image.

I know how big eagles are and how large the nest of an eagle can be. A tree large enough for an eagle to nest in is HUGE, in my mind. To think of a tree that great in size that sprouts from a seed the size of a mustard seed is quite amazing. And then I thought about how that is similar to the Kingdom of God. Well, actually I didn't so much think upon the Kingdom of God as I did upon God. I thought about Jesus Christ who was God manifest and made flesh. Jesus Christ who began from the smallest of beginnings - a tiny, helpless babe. How wonderful God is to give such a very real image of the Kingdom of God. You see Jesus was nothing - a babe which was (to the society of that day) lower than the lowest; children then were definitely the least and the last. And yet look at how God used that lowly state of being. From a tiny helpless infant came the redemption for the entire world. Jesus Christ - a mustard seed that grew into the mightiest of trees and took upon himself the sins and wounds, the brokenness of the entire world for the salvation of all. Isn't that just absolutely mind-boggling?

As I talked with Crystal this morning she pointed out how everything begins as a small seed. I thought of that too. I thought of how God uses the least likely to accomplish great and wonderful things. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Jesus, Peter, Paul.

We are all mustard seeds growing in this world and on our way to becoming greatness. The Kingdom of God is like that - taking the least likely and growing us all into much greater. I think that I'll look at people a little differently now. John, Crystal, Brian ... maybe even myself ... the potential that God is growing within each of us and the greatness that we are all becoming.

Go and look at the greatness in those around you.

Blessings,
memonica

There is a book that is written with particularly simplistic language that speaks to the child in every one of us; the first chapter is especially fitting for what John spoke to tonight at True North, releasing our own images of God and letting God be God.

Good Old Uncle George

God was a family relative, much admired by mum and dad, who described him as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in all of us. Eventually we were taken to visit "Good old Uncle George". (...) We cannot share our parents' professed admiration for this jewel in the family. At the end of the visit, Uncle George addressed us. "Now listen dear," he begins, looking very severe, "I want to see you here once a week, and if you fail to come let me just show you what will happen to you." He then leads us down to the mansion's basement. It is dark, becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear unearthly screams. In the basement there are steel doors. Uncle George opens one. "Now look in there dear," he says. We see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women and children who failed to visit Uncle George or to act in a way he approved. "And if you don't visit me dear, that is where you will most certainly go," says Uncle George. (...) Mom leans over us and says, "And now don't you love Uncle George with all your heart and soul, mind and strength?" And we, loathing the monster, say, "Yes I do," because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace. At a tender age religious schizophrenia has set in and we keep telling Uncle George how much we love him and how good he is and that we want to do only what pleases him. We observe what we are told are his wishes and dare not admit, even to ourselves, that we loathe him. - Good Goats: Healing our Image of God, Dennis and Sheila Linn

How true this passage rings to my heart; maybe this quote rings true to your heart as well. So any way, as John finished his sermon message this evening I was left with one really big question. How? How, John, are we to shed our images of God, the God from childhood, from youth, the only God we've ever known. How?