30 Days of Gratefulness

I'd like to explain a little about the "30 Days of Gratefulness" emphasis at my church that will, hopefully, help give context to any posts I may make on the subject. Being a part-time staffer at the church, it's been extremely exciting to watch this focus develop and blossom.

As the staff pondered the Thanksgiving season, we began to recognize that, although giving thanks to God is an extremely biblical concept, we'd hardly begun to scratch the surface of this subject over the years. We realized that, often, we urge people to THINK about what they're thankful for, but haven't encouraged or given sufficient opportunities for them to EXPRESS their thankfulness.

And so we're embarking on the grand adventure of challenging our congregation to recognize the goodness of God and praise Him, to report the goodness of God to those around us near or far, and to reflect God's love by freely sharing the goodness we've received from Him. We're urging our church family to declare God's praise privately in their hearts, and publicly in their words and actions - not to bring attention to themselves, but to the One who alone deserves it.

This is going to be a very exciting month. I'll keep you posted.

I'm Back

It's been WAY too long since my last post and I've been missing the time I spend mulling/writing oh so much. Life has just been really full. The delightfully good kind of full.

In my last post, I vowed to spend more time contemplating, philosophizing and writing. Well, we all know how THAT turned out! So I guess I'll just take it a day at a time and see what happens. Getting a blog post out on a regular basis happens to be one of the least of my "worries", even though it's most often a highly enjoyable proposition for me.

I'm very excited about a special focus at church this month that we're calling "30 Days of Gratefulness". I HOPE to pass along some thoughts that come out of this emphasis.

Thanks for not giving up on my blog, although you've had every reason to do so. Hopefully we'll be keeping in touch, blog-style, really soon.