Life In Greencastle

From Parker Black I believe in God our Father, creator of Earth.  Additionally, I believe in Jesus Christ His only son our Savior, who was conceived by the immaculate conception and born of the Virgin Mary. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and 3 days later was resurrected. I also believe that no one in this world is perfect.  We all make mistakes and have our ups and downs and our daily trials.  I feel like these mistakes (sins) are what help us learn to better ourselves as a person and to not make the same mistake twice.  By learning from our mistakes, we are able to grow and become better Christians. I also feel as that when we sin we make God unhappy because we are His creation, and when a creation messes up the creator is usually disappointed.  But when we do good in this world I also believe this makes God happy and makes us better people.  I also believe in the existence of the Holy Spirit. I believe that when Jesus died h...

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee ..." - Matthew 28:16 Ten-Year-Old Me I hated going to church when I was ten years old.   Yeah, that's where I want to begin:  the fact that ten-year-old Wes loathed going to church with my family on Sunday mornings. True story.  Back in 1989, on Sunday mornings at around 8:30 am at our home at 965 Maxwell Lane in the Colony Woods subdivision of Zionsville, Indiana, you probably would have found me hiding in my bed.  You wouldn't have known, perhaps, that I was hiding.  It would have just looked like I was sleeping in my bed - eyes closed, deep breathes and all.  But, I wasn't sleeping.  I was pretending - pretending not to hear my mom calling up the stairs to my sisters and me, pretending not to hear her tell us us to get up and get ready for church.   Every Sunday I would indulge in this fantasy.  Sunday after Sunday I would dangle out the hope that maybe if I stayed in bed long enough and pretended ...

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you ... In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials ..." - 1 Peter 1:3-4, 7        I've been thinking about old man Abraham, stumbling around from place to place with God's promise knocking around in his mind:  a promise from Yahweh to do wonderful things for he and Sarah.  "I'm going to make of you a great nation," Yahweh said (Gen. 12:2).  Then Yahweh expanded the promise, declaring that God would use Abraham to bless other nations (Gen. 12:2).  And then one more time, Yahweh made a third promise, this one even more specific and wildly audacious.  "Listen," Yahweh said, "no one but your very own son shall be your heir" (G...

[this is a re-post from August 2010] In the Gospel of John, Jesus encounters a lame man that leads to one shocking question. The story goes that Jesus encountered this man at a public place in Jerusalem where - apparently - quite a number of blind, lame and paralyzed men and women lay. In modern terms, this place – called Beth-zatha – was something like a safe-house, an ancient form of the modern day  Salvation Army . Lying there with the others was a man who had spent thirty-eight years of his life waiting for healing. Thirty-eight years! For almost four complete decades, this man's days began and ended in this public place. To many people in Jerusalem, the man had likely become part of the place - almost blending into the paved stones. This should not surprise us. It still happens in our own day - homeless men or women who begin to blend into the environment. But, for some reason, Jesus noticed the man. More than that, Jesus intentionally went up to this man, and asked him: ...

 "You've got to learn how to fall,       before you learn how to fly." - Paul Simon "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels--a plentiful harvest of new lives." - Jesus Last week, my favorite television show returned for what is going to amount to fourteen final episodes, split arduously into two more seasons.   Mad Men is the show, the 1960's period piece with its sharp and clean style.  Behind the slick suits and pomade, though, Mad Men  is ultimately probing a profound and universal question:  what happens to us as we age?   The central figure throughout the series has been a man known as Don Draper, a well groomed man who looks like he could easily slide into the role of Clark Kent.  For much of the first two seasons, we followed Don as he strode confidently through life, seemingly rising in power and prestige, all while...

"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." - Peter's encouragement to his fellow Christians, 1 Peter 3:15 What does a thirteen year-old boy have to look forward to? What does a freshman girl have to look forward to? Sunday afternoon, Brady Rhodes and I sat on the steps of our church sanctuary with five young adults, four jr. high students and one freshman.  And we wanted to find out the answer to these two questions. Actually, the answer to the first question was pretty easy to discover, if completely shocking at the same time. Any guesses?   Taco Bell .  Yeah, that's right.  We learned that Ethan Tuggle has been looking forward to Taco Bell's new breakfast menu for quite some time, so much in fact that he showed up at 7:00 am the first day Taco Bell unveiled its new contributions to our day's most important meal - walking a few blocks to be the first one to order. So, there...

Life In Diversity ec·o·tone / ˈekəˌtōn , ˈēkəˌtōn / Noun ECOLOGY 1.  a region of transition between two      biological communities. A few years ago, someone introduced me to this wonderful word:   ecotone .  I liked it immediately, and my love for it only grew when the person went on to tell me this.  Ecotones—these complex places of diversity— thrive with life.  I want to invite you to see our church– your church—as a potential ecotone.  And, I want to encourage you to live into the diversity of our church family. We are seeing the diversity of our body in a number of ways.  It’s present whenever the women’s Bible Study gathers in one end of the building and the daycare children play on the other end.  You can see it as we gather for worship with our pew of older widows in the back who arrive fifteen minutes before church starts and the younger families who find their way in somewhere before the passing o...