|  Summer is always a wonderful time for reading. Over the last month there is a book we have been reading and passing around here in the church office. The book is called, "Searching for Sunday," by Rachel Held Evans. The subtitle is "Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church," and the content of the book is Rachel Held Evan's journey of becoming disenfranchised with the church of her youth, wandering away from church, doubting, questioning, seeking, and then finding her way back to the body of Christ. As she finds her way she discovers new beauty and riches in the community of faith and the pattern of worship and liturgy. As a staff we have had many "around the water cooler" discussions of "Searching for Sunday," and it made us think we'd love to have these conversations with you! So if the book sounds of interest to you, grab a copy at one of our local bookstores or from Amazon.com (Remember to sign into Amazon through smile.amazon.com and Amazon will give a percentage of the cost to the church!). Later in the summer we will pick a date and anyone who'd like to can come together for a congregation book discussion. Whatever you maybe be reading this summer, may you find the riches and beauty of life with Christ ever revealed to you in new ways. Pastor Shelly Searching for Sunday, an excerpt "The Spirit is like breath, as close as the lungs, the chest, the lips, the fogged canvas where little fingers draw hearts, the tide that rises and falls twenty-three thousand times a day in a rhythm so intimate we forget to notice until it enervates or until a supine yogi says pay attention and its fragile power awes again. Inhale. Exhale. Expand. Release. In the beginning, God breathed. And the dust breathed back enough oxygen, water, and carbon dioxide to make an atmosphere, to make a man. Job knew life as "the breath of God in my nostrils," given and taken away. With breath, the Creator kindled the stars, parted a sea, woke a valley of dry bones, inspired a sacred text. So, too, the Spirit, inhaled and exhaled in a million quotidian ways, animates, revives, nourishes, sustains, speaks. It is as near as the nose and as everywhere as the air, so pay attention. The Spirit is like fire, deceptively polite in its dance atop the wax and wick of our church candles, but wild and mercurial as a storm when unleashed. Fire holds no single shape, no single form. It can roar through a forest or fulminate in a cannon. It can glow in hot coals or flit about in embers. But it cannot be held. The living know it indirectly-through heat, through light, through tendrils of smoke snaking through the sky, through the scent of burning wood, through the itch of ash in the eye. Fire consumes. It creates in its destroying and destroys in its creating. The furnace that smelts the ore drives off slag, and the flame that refines the metal purifies the gold. The fire that torches a centuries-old tree can crack open her cones and spill out their seeds. When God led his people through the wilderness, the Spirit blazed in a fire that rested over the tabernacle each night. And when God made the church, the Spirit blazed in little fires that rested over his people's heads. "Quench not the Spirit," the apostle wrote. It is as necessary and as dangerous as fire, so stay alert; pay attention...  |
