Henri Nouwen on Gratitude and Being God's Beloved

A couple of you asked me for copies of the devotional thought I read last Wednesday night to begin our time for giving thanks. I want more of you to have it. So here it is. It is by my favorite devotional writer, Henri Nouwen. He titled it, “The Spiritual Work of Gratitude.”

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

Here is another of his reflections titled, “The Still Small Voice of Love.”

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.

That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved."

If you would like to receive Nouwen’s Reflections as a daily email, visit HenriNouwen.org.

Our Giving in 2010 and 2011

Let’s make 2010 the last year we finish in the red. In 2010 we gave $144,757 toward our expenses, which amounted to $171,868. We fell $27,111 short, but we are going to make a healthy turn in 2011.

New Hope made two decisions last year that will help us a great deal this year. First, by conducting a “Pay Down the Debt Campaign” and adding some money from savings to reduce our mortgage principle, we reduced our monthly mortgage payment from $3100 per month to $326 per month. Second, we adopted a realistic budget. Last year’s budget was $180,108. This year it is $149,186.

With our monthly mortgage payments reduced by more than $2000, we are going to give enough to support our 2011 budget

In our Long Range Plan we said “our first objective is to pay off the existing debt of $70,000 before the expiration date of October 30, 2018.” We will do that by making monthly payments of $926.81 and by making an additional quarterly payment on the outstanding principal as cash flow permits. We also plan to become able to pay off our existing debt by increasing the number of church members who are giving 10% of their income to the church.

If you can give 10% of your income to support our ministries, I am asking you to do it this year. If you cannot give ten per cent, decide on a percentage of your income you can afford to give and give it regularly. We will have a good year of giving and stop our long-running practice of spending money out of our savings in order to pay our bills.

God has worked through our Church Council, our Budget Committee, and our Long Range Planning Committee to lead us to the place where we can begin to pay for our ministries, support missions, and put some money into savings. “Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise!”

"Thanks and Yes"

This is a prayer that I heard long ago attributed to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations. “For all the has been thanks. To all that will be yes.” That prayer expresses the way I feel about the past and the future of our church.

As I look back over 2010, I am grateful to be pastor of New Hope. There is nothing like the local church when it is working the way it is supposed to work. When I hear members say that our church feels like their extended family, I believe we are doing what the church is supposed to do. When I saw the church members who came to Ben Baiiley’s Memorial Service, I was glad for the support his family is receiving as we “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When Sharon Bailey told me that she looks forward to being in our Grief Support Group, I was glad that we are a church learning some new ways to expand its care.

As I look forward to 2011, I am enthusiastic and aware that there is a lot to be done to keep our church working the way it is supposed to. Here are a few things we will do this year.

_ A new Real Love group will teach participants the nature of God’s love and how to make loving choices.

_ Our Long Range Plan calls for the beginning of a Sunday School Class for young adults. I am working on it and hope to begin the class in February. It also calls on us to recruit and train enough new leaders of children and youth to achieve a ratio of one leader for every four students.

_ We want to increase the number of church members pledging to give a tithe (10%) or more of their income to support our ministries.

_ We want to do training that helps members discover how they can best serve Christ in or through our church by using S.H.A.P.E. materials to show members their Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences.

When you pray, thank God for all that has helped us see God’s love for us and say yes to the truth God will teach us in 2011.

Why Jesus Came

Richard Rohr, a Roman Catholic priest, says that Jesus identified his message with what he called the coming of the “reign of God” or the “kingdom of God,” whereas we have often settled for the sweet coming of a baby who asked little of us in terms of surrender, encounter, mutuality or any studying of the Scriptures or the actual teaching of Jesus.

I invite you, as we move from Christmas into a new year, to consider that the suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great to settle for any infantile gospel or to let your faith stop with a baby Jesus. What we call the Incarnation, God becoming a human being, becoming one of us, strikes directly at the heart of evil and corruption in the world. The Creator of the universe came to us as a helpless baby. He lived a perfect life of perfect love. When he died, he died taking on our sin and exposing the evil of our world. Then, the end of the story was not defeat. It was the defeat of death when he rose up from the grave and gave his power to the coming of the kingdom of God into our world and into our lives.

Jesus lives in us and invites us to live in the kingdom growing in our ability to love others and to work with him to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Thank you for doing justice and loving kindness by giving to our Global Missions Offering. We gave more than our goal of $700. Now, as we enter into the New Year, let’s give more than our 2011 goal of $150,000 for our ministries here at New Hope.

Walk in the Light

A passage from the Bible has stayed on my mind lately. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1John 1:6-7). These words came into my mind recently when someone trusted me enough to tell me some truth. That truth telling allowed me more deeply into this person’s life. I felt honored that I had been trusted. I felt as if I was being invited into a personal journey

How did I feel toward that person after that revealing conversation? I felt more like a friend and a fellow struggler in life. What the Bible says in the First Letter of John became a reality: “We have fellowship with one another.” God has shown us in Jesus how to walk in the light. We don’t have to be afraid of bearing each other’s burdens. We can tell the truth about ourselves and increase the love that flows between us.

This truth from John’s letter is also challenging us to see that this is how we get our sins forgiven. We have to tell the truth about them. That is what it means to walk in the light as God is in the light. When we tell the truth to God and to a trusted person who can love us, we invite God to make us clean and get the sin out of our lives.

That is what I love about living life with other followers of Christ. We can tell each other the truth, come out of the darkness and walk in the light and we get to live a shared life in which love for God and love for each other grows and grows.

I’m glad that we members of New Hope are experiencing a shared life with each other. May our light and love increase as we celebrate the birth of the One whose life is light. This is the way the Gospel of John says it: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).

Let’s learn some new truth about walking in the light this Christmas season. Tell your truth to God and to a trusted person. Then you will walk in the light of Christ and know fellowship and forgiveness.

The Whole Christmas Thing

A woman was Christmas shopping with her two children. After hours of looking at toys and much else and hearing both her children ask for everything they saw, the three of them got on an elevator. She was feeling what so many of us feel during the holiday season: pressure to go to every party, taste all the holiday food, get that perfect gift for every person, make sure not to forget anyone on our card list, and respond to everyone who sent us a card.

The elevator doors opened. A crowd was in it. She pushed her way in and dragged in her kids and bags of stuff. When the doors closed, she blurted out, “Whoever started this whole Christmas thing should be found, strung up and shot.”

From the back of the car everyone heard a calm voice respond, “We already crucified him.” For the rest of the trip down there was a tense silence in the elevator.

Have you ever heard anybody say, “I HAVE to do my Christmas shopping.” It sounds like a duty, and something is wrong with that picture. So what will happen if you simply don’t give gifts to people who have traditionally expected them? Many people will be relieved, because your gifts always made them feel obligated to give you something in return. Some people will be disappointed, because they have just been trading with you. So what have you really lost?

You can’t control what people think of you, but you could explain that all the shopping has begun to interfere with your celebrating the birth of Jesus. You could tell them that you don’t expect anything from them, either, but that you’re not telling them what to do.

God freely gave us his Son from a heart of love. What we all really want is to feel loved by people who care about us and enjoy being around us no matter what we do. Have you known love like that? God gives that kind of unconditional love. This year, receive the love of the One who started this whole Christmas thing.

Hope and Giving to the Church

Hope can be inspiration for giving money to the church. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” I’ll be honest with you. I hope that members of New Hope will give money to what they hope to see God do in our church.

Fleda and I are giving 10% of our income to New Hope because

• We hope to see parents bring children to church so that they grow up in church and love it. • We hope to see people who are distant from God come to know and love God as we know God in Jesus.

• We hope to see people become students of Jesus and grow spiritually and emotionally as they read and understand the Bible.

• We hope to see New Hope Baptist Church become stronger and continue to be a growing, loving church family long after we are gone.

We hope for some more visible things like new buildings, too, but what happens in people’s relationship to God is most important.