Dear Grace,
What a Sunday we got to experience together – a powerful experience of worship led by Christine and her team. I was texting with our new friend – guest worship leader, Michael Bethany, and this is what he had to say about his time with us.
“Thank you for inviting me this weekend. It was truly a taste of heaven for me. Better than anything I imagined. I am so encouraged to know that a place like Grace Community Church does exist.”
Yes, it is so encouraging that a place like Grace Community Church exists. I feel that as strongly as ever, and you are such a huge part of that. With all of our mess, I love that we are becoming a church in which we can hold space for all of us – all the good and hopeful parts, and also the hard and lamentable.
We just completed our pilot run of the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality course. About 90 of us have journeyed together over eight weeks, exploring the principles and practices that connect emotional and spiritual maturity.
As we read the final prayer over the entire group, I was filled with such emotion: gratitude and love for my brothers and sisters who have courageously asked God to take them back to go forward, shared their griefs and losses, and embraced new rhythms of silence through which we might give and receive the love of God. I can’t wait for part two of this course to begin in late February – Emotionally Healthy Relationships. Look out for course information in the coming weeks.
This coming weekend, we finish our fall series in the book of Colossians with a focus on the beginning of chapter 4 – a call to be devoted to prayer. I think it’s going to be a needed and powerful reminder of what we were created to do. Namely, to commune with the God who created us and looks upon us with love.
As we enter the Thanksgiving week, let’s not wait until Thursday to begin to intentionally express and speak our gratitude. One of my favorite books on the subject is by the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf called, “Free of Charge”.
My favorite concept is that gratitude is an interpersonal action. You give thanks TO someone FOR something/someone. Gratitude is the acknowledgment of having received from someone something that you did not have in and of yourself.
I think that posture is so crucial to the Christian life because everything we have, we have received from God. Therefore, we give thanks in every circumstance. It is interpersonal in the sense that we thank our Heavenly Father for giving to us above and beyond even what we need.
He’s been good even if your life right now is not the circumstances that you wish for, nor the season that you like. Let me encourage you for the sake of your own heart and soul to consider and to count those things that you have received from God no matter what life looks like, and let it rise up in thanksgiving.
I am thankful to God for you. I am thankful for your sincere faith demonstrated, and how you show up week in and week out. I am thankful to be part of a faith community that receives imperfection as gifts, vulnerability as kindness, and neediness as opportunity.
All of it coming together in the beautiful poema that God has begun and will bring to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
And while that day may not be here yet, we know that God has promised it, and it will surely come to pass.
This truth is actually the emphasis for our advent 2025 series. We’ll be looking at four scenes from the book of Revelation that remind us of the majesty and power of our coming Savior. I am asking God to stoke my own longings for the one who is to come, even as a way of setting my mind on, and seeking the things above, a natural way of living out the message of Colossians.
If you’re traveling, may the Lord grant you peace and the sense of His presence. If you’re coming together with family, may God remind you of who you are, His beloved one, so that you might show up as a gift of his love. And may each of us find in that feast, a table to belong to, reminding us of the feats that is to come in the new heavens and new earth!