Celebration Sunday

Welcome to Celebration Sunday!  Today, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we look back and celebrate all that’s happened in 2009.  In keeping with the theme of celebration, I thought I’d give you an all too incomplete thanksgiving list.  I am thankful for…

• The people who have taught my children to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”


• This year’s nearly 52 Operation Uplifts and all of the people who showed up with food for a small army.


• All of those who deployed and returned safely.


• All of their families who stayed home and prayed for them.


• The way this church became a Medieval castle for a week during the summer.


• All of the “ big losers” at Camp Idlewild.


• The people who work feverishly to keep this old building running.


• A great group of shepherds.


• Hard-working deacons.


• Dedicated Ministry leaders.


• Everyone who lets us and our kids mess up their house during Lifegroups.


• The way people stand around on the front lawn after church and talk while the kids play.


• Every meal taken to someone who was sick or had a baby or just needed help.


• Every couch that was loaded onto or unloaded from a moving truck by our Moving Ministry.


• The fact that I get paid to read and think and write and pray and then talk with you about it.


• All the times that I’ve thought of something that needed to be done only to find out that someone had already done it.


• Nursery workers who wrangle small children every week.


• Children’s Church volunteers who save the kids from my sermons, and vice versa.


• Another opportunity to celebrate with other people who have been rescued by God’s grace.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice.

--Meister Eckhart

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

--William Faulkner