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~ The Musings of the Rev. Douglas Forrester

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Monthly Archives: March 2019

Courage to Believe: Building Endurance

28 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by Douglas Forrester in Uncategorized

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Third Sunday of Lent – March 24, 2019

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

“But with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

runI once read a time-management related weblog where I encountered an article about the danger of wasting time. The author’s premise was this: the worst kind of time-wasting trap that we can fall into is not goofing off. It is doing fake work. When we are goofing off, we know you are goofing off. However, when we are doing fake work, we are doing things that seem like real work, except for the fact that they aren’t. So, for example, when I should be writing my sermon and I am instead filing papers on my desk, re-shelving my books, and checking e-mail and Facebook, I may be in my office, I may feel like I am working. If you were to peek through my window, I may even look like I am working, but I am not working. What I am doing is using fake work to assuage my conscience because what I am really doing is avoiding what truly needs to be done. I do it all the time. The reason the bushes at my house are pruned is because I do it when I really should be raking the leaves, and so on.

Which brings me to Lent, this wondrous forty-day season of the Christian liturgical year that should, if nothing else, save us from “fake piety.” It is a chance to allow God to change our wrong-headed and self-centered desires, so that our lives will follow our hearts in a more faithful direction. Lent is, in the broadest sense, about the admission that in order for us to embrace the life for which we were created, that we need God. As much as we sometimes hate to admit it, we are in need of God’s guidance, God’s grace, God’s redemption, and God’s forgiveness. In order to be kingdom people, there are things we need to make certain we do, and there are things we need to make certain we avoid. Lent is a time for us to remember this, and to make the necessary adjustments to our hearts and minds, knowing that as Jesus teaches, where our hearts are, there we will find our priorities and our desires.

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Courage to Believe: Conformed and Transformed

19 Tuesday Mar 2019

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Second Sunday in Lent – March 17, 2019

Philippians 3:17-4:1

On Friday, my youngest daughter Claire, my ten-year-old, was not feeling well, so I kept her home from school. She was not terribly sick, so we decided to go for a drive in the country in the area where, a half-decade before she was born, I served my second pastoral appointment, a three-congregation circuit of churches called the Prince George Charge, located just east of Hopewell.

I was able to show her the outside of the two of the churches and the parsonage, the first church home we had lived in, and the inside of Salem United Methodist Church in Burrowsville. For some reason, it was important to me that Claire see this part of the history of her family of origin, and I was surprised by the number of memories this little trip brought back to me. When we moved there, Ellen, our oldest, had just turned one and had been walking for only a few months. It was in that home that she learned to speak, the first home where she was able to really experience the arrival of Santa and the Easter Bunny. It was the house where we used a yardstick to make marks on the wall as Ellen grew and grew.

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Back Down The Mountain

03 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by Douglas Forrester in worship

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Screen Shot 1.pngTransfiguration Sunday – March 3, 2019 – Luke 9:28-43a

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In 2016, the global gathering of United Methodist lay and clergy delegates known as the General Conference gathered in Oregon for their quadrennial meeting. While dealing with the business of the denomination, they reached an impasse on matters regarding the marriage and ordination to ministry of LGBTQ persons. The result was twofold: a special, called meeting of the General Conference was scheduled for February 2019, and the Council of Bishops created a task force to work towards a resolution to this issue, a task force called the Commission on A Way Forward.

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