March Message from the Pastor

March Message from the Pastor
“You Were Made for a Miracle”

The theme for our Lenten sermons is “You Were Made for a Miracle.” I am excited about this invitation to consider how God calls each of us into this life for specific purposes. When we wake up to this call and align our lives with it in small and large ways, our lives become instruments for God’s action in the world. This will be the focus of the sermons to see the miracle of life as a gift and a challenge.

Miracle stories in the Bible are sometimes challenging to handle because they seem to be impossible from a scientific point of view. We sometimes get stuck on the mechanics of how a specific miracle took place. What we often forget is that the Bible is a book of faith expressing people’s experiences of the sacred. Miracle stories were people’s reflections on how they experienced the presence of God in certain difficult situations. In biblical times and cultures, people of faith often paid special attention to when God’s presence became palpable for them and cooperated with that presence and power. Thus, miracles were not more plentiful in biblical times than in our time. The big difference is people’s awareness of the sacred from ancient times to our time.

As we share the stories of our ancestors in faith and how God moved in their lives, we will be invited to look at how God works in our midst today. We will ponder how God has created each of us to be a miracle. In his book Made for a Miracle, Mike Slaughter writes, “Did you know that you were made for a miracle? In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that we will do greater things than he has ever done. Jesus says it, about YOU! It’s hard to believe that you or I were made for a miracle, but we were. What keeps us from seeing ourselves as miracle workers when Jesus tells us that we were made for a miracle?”

I pray that our Lenten journey will help us to claim our call to let God use our gifts to bless the world. Miracles take divine and human cooperation when the mundane and the sacred become closely intertwined. The world is full of God’s glory. Our work is to pay attention so that we can be conduits of God’s healing love!

In Christ,
Pastor Roula Alkhouri

Message

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Written by Pastor Roula Alkhouri

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