A Month of Love
The culture around us is quick to shift our focus from Christmastide to Valentines! As Thanksgiving and Chritmas encroach on Hallowe’en on store shelves and advertisements, so Valentine’s Day moves quickly on the heels of “The Holidays.” So, let’s go with it! After all, our two guardrails of our life in Jesus and our treatment of others are “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus provides a working definition of “neighbor” in his parable of the good Samaritan – anyone we see in need.
For instance, we are gearing up for the Ashe County Summer Reading Adventure – June 19-July 28. Our steering committee is enlisting community and church partners to make this God-sized dream a reality. With major funding from The Duke Endowment we will help 24 children from rising 1st-3rd grades improve their reading confidence, enjoyment, and grade-level skill. We need LOTS of volunteers and many kinds of material support. If you want to help in any way, call the church office at 336-246-5292.
Worship will be focused around biblical themes of love. Sermon titles include a meditaion on higher levels of love from “The Golden Rule” to the “Titanium Rule” (2/5); how we practice PDA as followers of Jesus (2/12); and a Wesleyan/Moravian Love Feast (2/19). I’m looking forward to great music during this season! We will focus on helping others as we celebrate “Souper Sunday” on the day a certain football game is played on February 12. And we begin the season of Lent, 40 days of self-examination and self-denial excluding Sundays, with a Fat Tuesday (Shrove Tuesday) celebration on February 21 followed by Ash Wednesday on the 22nd. All of these celebrations and times of worship will provide opportunites to love Jesus by loving others.
I’ve realized that my job is to love you and to trust your love. Together in love we will realize what needs to be changed or done as we move together toward “perfection in love in this life.”
May the peace and assurance of our bonds in Christ,
Pastor Chris