Gift-Giving at the Holidays

This was our church’s first year “adopt(ing) a family” from Bethany House Services to provide gifts and needed items. Thanks to all who were able to participate, purchase, wrap and label gifts, and transport them, and to the kids from church posing for pictures in the warehouse receiving area.

Items purchased included silverware, shoes, gift cards, clothes and toys to bring smiles to two little ones and their mom; a family experiencing homelessness. We hope they have a Merry Christmas and feel the love we wrapped into each present.

Two kids from our congregation who helped unload the gifts.

Give Thanks to the Lord…

Crabapple Tree in Suburbia

Thank you to the Swedenborgian Church of North America for their recent email with the following text from Emanuel Swedenborg:

For everything that flows from the Lord… is freely given. The Lord does, it is true, demand humility, worship, thanksgiving, and much else from a person, which seem like repayment, so that His gifts do not seem to be free. But the Lord does not demand those things for His own sake, for the Divine derives no glory at all from a person’s humility, worship, or thanksgiving. It is utterly inconceivable that any self-love should exist within the Divine, causing Him to require such actions for His own sake. Rather, they are required for humankind’s own sake, for if someone possesses humility they are able to accept good from the Lord, since in that case they have been parted from self-love and its evils which stand in the way of their accepting it. Therefore the Lord desires a state of humility in a person for that person’s sake, because the Lord can flow in with heavenly good when that state exists in them. The same applies to worship and thanksgiving.

Emanuel Swedenborg

#ThursdayThoughts: #Survival, #Sanity, #Attention #Delight

From “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron

“Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention…The quality of life, is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.” Julia Cameron

As we weather these days ahead, days of uncertainty, let us pay attention and enjoy the moments that uplift us. Sharing our gifts of noticing, and nurturing. Listen to the birds beginning their morning discourse before the sun has even created the horizon. Listen to the sounds of children tumbling out of bed. Listen to the beat of your own heart. Here for a reason.

Delight in the gifts we are given.

Black capped chickadee

#WeekendPlans: Informal Service– #GiftsFromGod

Please join us Sunday for our informal service, offered by lay-leader, Brenda Helton. The subject of the service will be “Gifts”. Please bring an example of a “gift” or “gifts” you feel the Lord has given you. Hospitality begins at 10:30, Service at 11. 845 Congress Avenue, Glendale, OH, 45246.

#Happy Saturday, Be a shining Gift to the #world

Saturday Sunflower

How can you be a gift to the world today? Being kinder? Volunteering? Laughing with someone who is sad? Be here. Brighten a day!