Life In Greencastle

Evening Prayer "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord." -Psalm 122:1 Wednesday evenings @ 6:00 pm in our sanctuary A time of community prayer and worship ...

"In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint ... The choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious." - Henri Nouwen

We moved our way through the third chapter of Philippians yesterday, which includes Paul's famous statements about pressing on towards the prize that awaits him in Christ Jesus. It gave us the chance to consider where our own focus has been of late and to remember that as Christians we are called onward towards a "sure and certain hope," a heavenly prize that far outweighs anything we could win, achieve, or secure in this life. We have this hope always set before us, but we are also now entering that time of year where we are encouraged and called to begin the journey towards our new life in Jesus Christ in earnest. It is the season we call Lent: this forty day journey that leads us up to Holy Week. For most of us, Lent is equated with some type of new commitment. We give up chocolate, or - if you prefer - we commit ourselves to do something positive in a new way. We make some gesture to show our devotion to God. In recent years, though, some of these disciplines ha