THE BIRTH OF ETHAN GAIUS

/ joseph elon lillie / 2 Comments

While everything else has been going on in the church and in town, we have had our own excitement here at The Vicarage (our family home). Last Thursday afternoon my daughter Melanie went into labor at the local Market Basket in the bread aisle. She was with her husband and two daughters. They came right home and dropped their daughters off with us and then went straight to the hospital. By the time she reached the hospital she was feeling the urge to push. The hospital attendants got her into labor and delivery and she delivered one minute after they got her onto a delivery bed!

Little Ethan Gaius is now home, all 9 pounds 4 ounces of him. Mother and baby are doing fine as we transition to a Vicarage of seven.

PRAYING FOR VALUES

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It’s not even 6 A.M., but as so many mornings go I have been up and praying since 3 A.M. I can do that for a few mornings straight and then I need to sleep in until 5 or 6 A.M. I like rising before the sun. It gives me time to pray and do my morning reading.

Right now I am reading through the Psalms again. I am also reading a book entitled Empowered To Pray by Joe Oden and another book given to me by the President of our local Council on Aging about the Senior Centers of today. entitled The New Neighborhood Senior Center.

This morning I have to get the animals taken care of early because I need to be at the church for 8 A.M. to be part of a leadership team meeting rewriting our church’s core values. We have been at this work for about a year and we are almost done with it. We have discovered many things about ourselves as a community through these last months. We have discovered our desire for authentic community, our desire to live on mission, We have also discovered that there is an aspiration towards a value of prayer. I am convicted (and I don’t use that word lightly) that as a body we must develop this value if we are to accomplish any of the other things we value as a part of our mission.

WHAT IS YOU STRONGEST PERSONAL VALUE?

SEEING THROUGH THE HAZE

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Northern MA is just coming through two days of haze caused by the wildfires in Canada and the Midwest. Yesterday as I picked up my son and his family at Logan airport you could smell the fire in the air.

Today I woke to clear blue skies, but at 2:30 P.M. the haze is starting to gather again. I feel like nature is just echoing what is going on in the human world….so much haze so many distractions that threaten to draw my attention and consume my thinking. For me here in New England the skies are an unsettling distraction. This isn’t Utah or Colorado or Canada. There is no fire here. It’s not my battle to fight. The skies like so many other things, I can do nothing about, are threatening to keep me distracted from the work God has for me to do.

I’ll note the skies and put my finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, but I will not let myself be distracted from this place this work.

  1. The church has twenty five acres of land to develop through prayer.
  2. We are called to raise up 100 Volunteers for our town.
  3. We are called to raise up 100 volunteers for the work of prayer in our region
  4. We are called to build community koinonia
  5. We are called above all else to bring the message of Christ’s gospel right here in this place.

This is our work. This is my work. The sky (among other things is my distraction).

WHAT IS YOUR DISTRACTION TODAY?