Sometimes it amazes me how much the Daily Bible Reading can capture where I am at in terms of daily thoughts. Today the reading is from 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28:
Final Instructions and Greetings
My friends, we ask you to be thoughtful of your leaders who work hard and tell you how to live for the Lord. Show them great respect and love because of their work. Try to get along with each other. My friends, we beg you to warn anyone who isn’t living right. Encourage anyone who feels left out, help all who are weak, and be patient with everyone. Don’t be hateful to people, just because they are hateful to you. Rather, be good to each other and to everyone else.
Always be joyful and never stop praying. Whatever happens, keep thanking God because of Jesus Christ. This is what God wants you to do.
Don’t turn away God’s Spirit or ignore prophecies. Put everything to the test. Accept what is good and don’t have anything to do with evil.
I pray that God, who gives peace, will make you completely holy. And may your spirit, soul, and body be kept healthy and faultless until our Lord Jesus Christ returns. The one who chose you can be trusted, and he will do this.
Friends, please pray for us.
Give the Lord’s followers a warm greeting.
In the name of the Lord I beg you to read this letter to all his followers.
I pray that our Lord Jesus Christ will be kind to you!
Last night was Bible Study once again on the book "The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion is seeking a better way to be Christian."
We were looking at the third Migration - The Missional Migration. On this reading I did have strong opinions. I am very supportive of the writings of the author Brian D. McLaren. I felt that he had really gotten into this idea in a way that was matching my own thoughts of the past thirty five years and where my Anglican Church was heading. It was a slow movement back into more active Anglican Church life for me. I had moved with my United Church husband to his Church as he wanted his children to have that experience in their lives. Personally I think the more ecumenical you are the better you can see the world and so I agreed. A few years in though and I really did have second thoughts about that and stayed home from the United Church this one particular Sunday just to see if that would work better for me. Certainly I found the quiet time in contemplation reading through my Book of Common Prayer the Morning Prayer was much more satisfying to me. I was busy with a two year old and a ten year old plus I had started working once again at home. I worked at home for about fifteen years proofreading and editing mostly scientific journals. It was a comfortable moment in my life as I had a couple of hours just to myself. However my husband found it difficult to manage our two year old and Church Treasurer so I returned once again to help with that and created a two year old Sunday School Class since the numbers warranted a separate class and they were too busy to be in the nursery. Instead I started to go to early service at the local Anglican Church and followed that path until we started to attend the United Church in downtown Ottawa in the mid 90s as the more academic sermons appealed to us and my husband had completed ten years as Treasurer at the local United Church and his fifteen years of singing in the Choir. We are loners, my husband and I, and we did not fit into our age group at the local United Church. To be honest, I am more of a Bible Study and service person in the Church. I was doing World Day of Prayer (and did do that for about a dozen years) plus I was Treasurer for Camp Bitobi (a United Church Camp in the Gatineau Hills). A lot changed suddenly in the mid 90s as I returned to work outside of the home; stepped down from the area World Day of Prayer Committee and Treasurer for Camp Bitobi. I needed time to come up to scratch in the newly computerized world although we had had a computer for over ten years by then. I had not really done very much on it except word processing and excel spreadsheets usually for my husband's volunteer activities and mine.
In 1995 I started to use email and joined an Anglican Listserv and I found a place for me in the worldwide Anglican Communion. But back to the Daily Bible Reading. In essence this is what the book is about. It is well written. There are parts that I am not in agreement with; I am not one to throw out the familial traditions of the Anglican Church. I learned the Lord's Prayer from my grandfather who took the time to painstakingly teach me the words when I was quite young. I can remember saying the Lord's Prayer over and over again with him. There are parts of the Church that we must bring forward with us as we march into this new world that COVID-19 has created.
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