Come Celebrate Jesus!

Dear Friends in Christ:

Our choir is preparing a musical cantata for Sunday, December 20, 11:00 a.m. It is titled, “COME CELEBRATE JESUS”. I hope that many of you will be able to attend worship that day.
As I have been rehearsing for this, the thought came to me that this is exactly what we do whenever we gather to worship, year-around. Why do we come to church? We come to celebrate Jesus!

In my daily meditations last week, I read the following article. As you read it, my prayer is that you will celebrate the love of Jesus who always meets you here in your church home:

Some of you know the story of writer Anne Lamott. When she was twenty-five, her father died after a long struggle with brain cancer. Over the next few years Anne herself began to suffer from an overwhelming sense of desperation and fear which she tried to suppress with alcohol and pills. Although she was managing to write and publish successful novels at the time, it was clear that her life was spinning out of control. In her memoir, Traveling Mercies, she writes about this dark period of her life. And most importantly she tells how a community of Christian faith, a neighborhood church called St. Andrew, came to her rescue.
In her book, she tells the time-honored story of a little girl who was lost. This girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where her family lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was frightened. Finally, a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, “You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.”
Anne Lamott writes, “And that is why I have stayed so close to mine—because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, when I hear their voices, I can always find my way home!”

--Pastor David Fetter

† † †