861 Fuller Ave NE - Grand Rapids, MI 49503 - PH # 616.459.2773
Northeast
Community News – July 24, 2012
Dear Friends and Family,
What a wonderful day we had in the Lord, Sunday! After Joan led us
in our announcements, we received a ‘Camp Meeting Report’ from several who took
part in the Camp Meeting last week at Indian Lake Nazarene Camp. We discovered
God moved mightily in the services and the conventions! Praise God! We also
rejoiced with the addition of two more praise singers this week! What a joy to
see Irene Pratt and Joan Grinwis join Pastor Amy and I leading the congregation
in singing our hymns and choruses! God is so good to us! Amen!
God’s message this week was titled, ‘Building God’s Kingdom’ and
came from Neh. 3:1-31. We remember Nehemiah taught us to look for and seek the
broken places, turn to God, stay humble, pray, wait, and know God is readying
the people for change. This week we discovered building or rebuilding God’s
Kingdom needs the cooperation, teamwork, and efforts of the full community,
including you!
First, Nehemiah taught us to put God first! The very first part of
the wall to be rebuilt was the Sheep Gate nearest the Temple (v. 3:1a). Before
we do anything else to build the Kingdom or rebuild our lives we need to start
and maintain a vibrant relationship with Jesus. God needs to come first!
Not only does Nehemiah teach us to put God first, we also find the
Holy Spirit bringing unity to the work. Throughout Neh. c. 3 we find the words
‘next to him’ used repeatedly. Men and women are working shoulder to shoulder
without any conflict; expert craftsman are working beside perfume-makers,
goldsmiths, and priests in perfect harmony. While our culture competes against
one another, the people rebuilding the wall submit to the unifying leadership
of the Holy Spirit. If we want to build the Kingdom, we need to let God lead,
too!
Nehemiah also teaches us about sacrifice. Many of those working on
the wall were from 15-20 miles away and would not benefit directly from the
finished work. Yet, they set aside their own fields and families to build God’s
Kingdom. Whether it is behind the scenes or up front, sacrifice is still needed
in the church today! In fact, the church is unable to build the Kingdom without
sacrifice.
Finally, Nehemiah taught us the importance of passion and going
the second mile. Between vv. 20-30 we find many workers willing to repair
another section of the wall! They could have said, ‘well, we did our part’ and
gone home, but they stayed until the work was completed.
In v. 20, we discover Baruch was zealous about the work. He was
passionate, deeply concerned and on fire for the Lord. Do we get excited about
doing the Lord’s work or something else?
Nehemiah teaches us if we want to build the Kingdom we need to 1)
put God first, 2) let the Holy Spirit lead and unify us, 3) sacrifice our gifts
and talents to God, and 4) go the extra mile and be passionate about serving
God! Let’s go!
This week’s Bible study is titled ‘Spiritual Growth.’ One of the
great possibilities of the Christian life is endless spiritual growth. The
Christian life should never become static. We must always be moving ahead to
new levels of experience. Join us Wednesday at 6:30 and learn about ‘Spiritual
Growth.’
PASTOR AMY
PREACHES AUG. 05!
Most know Pastor Amy Orban accepted a call to fulltime Christian
Ministry and after being interviewed by Pastor Dan, our Church Board, and
filling out the proper paperwork received her Local Pastor’s License May 20.
The Local Pastor’s License is her first step in the long process towards
ordination. She will need to complete her education, participate in many
ministerial experiences, and face repeated examinations in the areas of
‘being,’ ‘knowing,’ and ‘doing.’
In the Church of the Nazarene education must be accompanied by
practical experience. So, as Pastor Amy prepares to enroll in college this fall
to begin her formal education, she must also have practical experiences to
confirm her call and ‘flesh out’ pastoral ministry. Therefore, it is with great
joy we announce Pastor Amy will deliver her first sermon on Aug. 05. Pray for
her, invite friends, and prepare to encounter God through the heart and life of
our new pastor.
Blessings!
Pastor Dan
Hello From
Pastor Amy/Your Part-Time Church Secretary
My
office hours will be on Tuesdays from 8am-5pm, but if you need to see me, you
may want to call first. My responsibilities also include preparing our weekly
program, so if you have an event that you would like to put in the program or
newsletter, please feel free to contact me!
On Prayer
Requests:
If you have a specific praise or prayer request which you would like to appear
in the program and/or newsletter, please make sure to fill out the tear-off
sheet in the weekly program, or contact me at any time.
Please Update
Me! We
have a long, ongoing list of prayer requests. Please keep me updated. Requests
will be pulled from the newsletter & program after 3 weeks. Thank you!
Church
Office:616-459-2773 My Contact Info:
616-514-9521 or amyorban@hotmail.com
NEWS
& EVENTS
Ladies
LIFT is Taking a Break!
What a blessing it has been to see up to 20
women of many backgrounds come together to share food, fun, crafts, and a
message of hope twice a month. Thank you to everyone who came, participated,
and shared life. Irene Pratt has led this wonderful ministry for almost a year,
but now senses it is time to take a break. So, effective immediately the Ladies
LIFT program is on break. Thank you Irene for all of your hard work! Join us in
prayer as we seek God’s leadership!
Come to the Fire 2012
Olivet Nazarene
University is hosting the 2012 Come to the Fire Women’s retreat from October
11-13. This is an amazing opportunity for women to fellowship and be
spiritually nurtured in a powerful way. We will have more details as well as
brochures in the next couple of weeks, but we want ALL WOMEN to know that we
are already planning! So if you are interested, please talk to Janie Hathaway
or Pastor Amy.
Wednesday Night Dinners on Summer Break!
For the summer months,
we will NOT be holding our once-a-month Wednesday Night Dinners. If you would
like to be responsible for planning this dinner starting in the Fall, we would
love to have someone creative make it their own! If you think this is for you,
talk to Pastor Amy.
Don’t Forget
About First Friday Chinese Lunches!
Just
a reminder that on the first Friday of every month, several of us meet at the
Empire Buffet on Alpine Avenue at 11:30am to enjoy fellowship and lunch. The
food is delicious as well as cheap, and no reservations are required. Just show
up and enjoy! Talk to Tracy Tamm if you have any questions. Next Lunch Date: Friday August 3rd
@ 11:30am
Northeast Community Potluck: Sunday August 12
We will be holding
another one of our famous potlucks on Sunday, August 12 immediately following
our morning worship service. Bring a dish to pass, and invite friends and
family to visit – everyone is welcome! There is always a ton of delicious food
and good conversation. See Cherry Pakiela to help set-up or tear-down.
Healthy Homes Volunteer and Services Opportunity
The healthy homes
coalition of West Michigan is a non-profit organization that seeks to eliminate
housing conditions that harm children’s health. They focus on environmental
health, including lead poisoning, carbon monoxide and radon exposure, pest
management, fire safety, asthma, accident prevention, and more. Healthy Homes
would love your help if you are interested in volunteering for them! They are
also offering to install FREE smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detectors in
homes with children 5 and under. This is available for homeowners as well as
renters. This is a great coalition to check out, as they offer so many services
to homes with children! For more information about healthy homes, talk to
Pastor Amy, or call 616-241-3300, or email info@healthyhomescoaltion.org.
Praise Team Singers Wanted!
Would you like to sing
with Pastor Dan on Sunday morning? One commented they ‘didn’t know they could
join me’ and she was surprised. Pastor Dan would love to see more folks use
their gift of singing with him on Sundays. All he requires is a humble spirit,
a willingness to attend practice on Wednesday night after bible study and
Sunday morning at 9:00am, and a desire to worship God! Interested? Let Pastor
Dan know!
No July
Children’s Program!
In
addition to other July cancellations, we will NOT be holding any Wednesday
Night Program for children. The children’s program will pick up at it’s usual
time on the first Wednesday in August at 6:30pm.
New Website!
We have launched our new
website!
Here is the link:
Please take the time to
check it out, and understand that the site will be under construction as we
build it up and get used to the new software. Please send any input or ideas to
amyorban@hotmail.com.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in helping keep our website updated, Amy would love the
help of someone who is more adept at using technology, so let her know!
Children’s
Program
In addition to the weekly Children’s
Church we have added two new programs for our Children!
At 10:00am on Sundays during our
Sunday School hour, we now have a
Children’s Reading time. During this 45 minute period before church we will
be reading about missionaries from the Church of the Nazarene. We have a series
of 6 books that will be read. These books will be read aloud by adults from the
church. Children who attend regularly and listen to all 6 books will be treated
to lunch at Chuckie Cheese! We will complete the readings by the end of May.
On Wednesday nights @ 6:30pm Pat and
Shannen Parsaca have started the Caravan
program, which is a scouting, or kids’ club, type of program. All children
grades K – 6 are welcome!
In Children’s Church we have started
a “Children Helping Children”
program. This will be part of the semi-annual Alabaster Offering. Each child
will have a box of their own. Every week they attend Children’s Church a
quarter will be added to their box. In addition they may bring an offering to
put in the box. All Alabaster Offerings are used to buy property and build
schools and churches on the mission field. The Children will be able to march
with their boxes on Alabaster box Sundays. We hope to see your children on
Sundays and Wednesdays. If you have any questions please ask Cherry Pakiela or
Gerry Dawson!
Want to help, but not sure how?
If you are wondering where to plug
in, but are not sure how, we have opportunities. Current opportunities include
a soundboard worker, nursery helpers, childrens workers, potluck coordinators,
visiting our shut-ins, greeters and ushers, visitor follow-ups, Sunday School
teachers, music leaders, people willing to shovel snow in the winter, and much
more. It doesn’t matter how long you have been attending our church, serving is
a great way to honor God and get to know the people around you! If you sense a
call to a specific area or need some ideas to pray about, please contact Amy
Orban or Cherry Pakiela or Irene Pratt.
Upcoming Events
August
3 First Friday Chinese Lunch @
11:30am Empire Chinese Buffet
August
5 Communion/Family Church – NO
Children’s Church
August
12 NE Community Potluck after
morning worship service
Northeast
Community Church of the Nazarene
Church
- 616.459.2773 Parsonage -
616.459.0402 Pastor Dan Cell -
616.204.1153
Pastor
Amy Orban – 616.514.9521
Other Contact
Numbers:
Tracy
Tamm First
Friday Chinese Lunch 616-406-9602
Gerry
Dawson Sunday
School/Children’s Church 616-863-6808
Cherry
Pakiela
Sunday
School/Children’s Church 616-916-7595
Pat
& Shannen Parsaca Weds Night
Children’s Program 616-272-6021
Theo
Orban Weds
Night Youth Group 616-890-4045
Larry
Branagan Trustee 616-538-8765
“Christianity,
if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately important.” -C. S. Lewis
July Worker Schedules
Nursery
July 29 SS –Janie Hathaway & Shannen
Parsaca
Worship – Lindsey Wright
& Tracy Tamm
Counters
July 29
– Larry & Terry
Announcements
July 29
– Alannah Parsaca
Weekly thoughts,
life-lessons, and reflections from a redeemed child of God,
a mother, a wife, a
sinner under the Cross of Jesus Christ, and a Pastor-in-training. July
24, 2012
Frailty
I saw a
friend yesterday. My friend is terminally ill. (I needed to say that out loud.)
We have known this for some time. They have not given her a time frame or a
“time-stamp” as she calls it, but we know that she will get progressively
worse. There is much unknown in the timing. At some point, when she is sick enough,
she will be put on a list for an organ transplant which she may or may not
receive. This standard of “sick enough” is based on some objective measurement
of counts having to do with blood cells and function and enzymes, all of which
sounds like total gobbledygook to me because all I know is that my friend is very sick.
She is
a close friend, and she has been there for all my major milestones. We share
our recovery from drugs and alcohol, blessed freedom. She introduced me to my
husband and raved at me like a lunatic about what a wonderful guy he is and I
better not let him get away. She did my make-up at my wedding and has seen us
have our two boys. She is my go-to person when I feel like a lunatic, and she
pulls me back from the cliff of self.
She has
good days, and she has bad days. There are the days when we talk about the
heavy things, and there are the days when we don’t go there. But it’s always
there, underneath, lurking, that heavy dark thing that you can’t wish away.
On one of her better days, we talked about
denial. It went something like this:
Her: “I
know I’m in denial. I’m in denial and it’s just sick what my brain is doing. It’s
like I look in the mirror, and I’ve lost all this weight, and I feel good, and
I look pretty good, and I just have these flying thoughts that maybe the
doctors are totally wrong, maybe it disappeared, maybe the illness is still out
there somewhere and not really right here attacking my body like they say it
is.”
Me:
“Yeah but aren’t we all in denial? I mean, about everything bad really? It’s
like, you’re sick, so it’s in your face where you can’t avoid it, but the truth
is that I could still die before you do. We have no way of knowing, really. We’re
all dying, and we’re all living like we’re not because we don’t know how to do
it any other way. We can’t possibly live every moment in some impossible state
of preparedness for that which you can’t prepare for. So you’re not really
strange in that.”
I live
in denial about my own death sure, but in that conversation I realized that I
live in denial about her death too. The hard thing about seeing her yesterday,
was that for the first time, she really looked
sick. Her eyes looked tired, her skin a pale grayish color, the whites of
her eyes jaundiced, her face wearing the grimace of pain. Her walk was slow and
tender, and she was fragile in a way that I have never seen her before.
It is
ever-so-startling when these moments of reality come crashing in on our denial,
isn’t it? In a moment, sickness and death became a present reality to me
instead of something from which I could continue to hide from, safe up on my
intellectual mountaintop.
But God’s
light shines into the darkness. Through this illness with which she suffers, we
have been brought to a new point of friendship, one where pretenses are dropped
and masks are flimsy at best.
The important things now take precedence, and
everything else is non-essential. There is now a simple love between us which
is not fogged up by veils of character defects, attitudes, shortcomings, and
differences. I guess reality is much more clear that way.
I know,
I believe, and I have seen how God uses even the ultimate weapons of evil –
sickness and death – to draw us closer to Him. As my favorite quote from Corrie
Ten Boom goes, “God’s light shines the brightest in the darkness.” She wrote
that in reflection of the presence of God with her while she suffered in a Nazi
camp during WWII.
So
there is hope and blessings in this part of our journey together too. Just in a
different way, maybe in a way that is more real and more spiritual. Sometimes
things are just heavy and sad, and there are no clichés, no memory verses, and
no one-liners to take that away. We spend almost all of our time on earth trying
to pretend away the heavy sadness, so when it’s really in our face, I think it’s
okay to just call it heavy and sad. I know that so many of us are now, or have
been, in this heavy and sad place with the people we love dearly.
All over
scripture we learn that we will indeed suffer in this broken world, but that God
will comfort, and in turn we will comfort each other by our experience. The
promise of suffering and comfort are inseparable, we cannot share in the one
without sharing in the other. We share in both the light and the dark.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in
all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort
we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the
sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-5
I have
found comfort in knowing that I can throw my big questions up to a bigger God. O God, why? And I trust Him, even though He doesn’t
answer me with the imparted wisdom which I so desire. Because I either trust
Him or don’t, questions and all. And I don’t believe He requires me to be
without questions. I guess if He does, I’m in big trouble.
What I
do know, is that suffering is par for the course in a life full of the human
condition, the condition which points all the more clearly to the need for the
Savior. When it is darker, He is lighter. When I am frail, He is love.
So the
frailty of my friend brings forth my frailty, but praise be to God who gives us
the perspective to remain teachable and open to blessings even as we suffer and
share in the suffering of others. He is the great comforter.
My thoughts today are simple and a bit sad:
pray for my friend, won’t you? Pray for
her physical pain and her mental pain. Pray that she has peace within her
relationships and with God.
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