A Library for the Methodist School in Cap Haitian

I have been looking for books to share with Haitian children and came across a book by Uri Shulevitz, How I Learned Geography.  It is a brief story, illustrated by the author, of his life as a WWII refugee living in Central Asia.  It is a perfect book for Haitian children—an interesting story with a good message that takes place in an economically depressed country. The author tells how he went to bed hungry one night because his father brought home a map rather than bread. This map played a key role in the development of his imagination and drawing skills.  How important is it for people who struggle for their daily bread to develop their imagination?

How many books are in your home?  Did you read stories to your children?  Many Haitian homes contain a Bible and many students have at least some of the books they need for school, but, for the most part, that’s about it.  There is no lending library in Cap Haitian and there may not be one in the entire country. Does the fact that you have read many great books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows, Stuart Little, Homer Price, and A Tale of Two Cities have anything to do with the fact that you have a job, participate in a democracy, and live in community with others?  Did fiction by  C. S. Lewis and J. R. R Tolkein help bring you a step closer to the Kingdom of God? 

Relief is meeting people’s basic needs now.  Development is helping people meet their needs in the future.   There are people in Haiti whose basic needs are not being met today, but tomorrow is a bigger threat to most Haitians than is today.  As Christians we understand that knowing Jesus a key factor for meaningful development to take place.  Is it enough?  How important is literacy and access to good books to the development of a society?  What role does the imagination play?

I think that building a library for the Methodist primary and secondary school in Cap Haitian (College Model) provides a wonderful opportunity for our church to contribute to the development of Haiti—one mind and imagination at a time.  Good books, unlike aid dollars, can never end up in the wrong hands.   The first goal is to raise the funds for the library building and books.  The ongoing challenge and opportunity will be to help the school select books, develop a system to circulate the books in the community, and create a culture that enjoys and values reading. This should keep us busy for some time.

Bill Benish

The Joy of Giving

What is your first memory of Christmas?

Perhaps it involves receiving a special gift? Maybe it’s a memory of going to a relative’s home for the holiday, singing carols as a family or making luminaries. Perhaps it’s your first memory of being at the Christmas Eve service.

johnpowley.wol.org/blog/johnsblog/christmasvisitor

Do you remember the first time you knew the joy of giving, rather than receiving?

The first time I remember being excited about giving was the first time I made gifts to give my family. I was about ten years old, and at that time we didn’t do crafts at school to take home. But a children’s program on TV had a craft spot where they demonstrated how to make things. When it got close to Christmas they always showed you how to make a hanging Advent candleholder – it involved coat hangers and tinsel, but I could never figure out what to hang it from, as it was fairly big!

retrobabble.com

Anyway, one week they showed you how to make a snowman gift holder. It was a glass jar, covered with cotton wool and decorated to look like a snowman, then filled with something appropriate for the recipient.

I made one each for my parents, my sister and my grandparents. The ones for my mum and nana were filled with bath salts, my dad’s and grandad’s with mini-cigars (provided by Mum!) and my sister’s with candy. They were quite large and I wanted them to be a surprise on Christmas morning, which was when we opened our presents. This was made extra difficult by the fact that we were spending Christmas away that year.

We were going to be with my nana and grandad at an old coast guard’s cottage on the east coast. So I had to secrete them in my suitcase, and keep them hidden in my bedroom. Then I had to somehow place them on the mantelpiece on Christmas morning before anyone was up, so they’d be a surprise. 

One major obstacle was getting downstairs without disturbing everyone. The upstairs bedrooms at the cottage all connected directly with each other, with no hallway. So, on Christmas morning, before anyone else was awake I had to creep from our bedroom without disturbing my sister, then through my parents’ bedroom, then into my grandparents’ bedroom where the stairs were. Tiptoeing down the creaky stairway I made it downstairs without anyone knowing (or letting on that they knew!) I carefully placed my glass snowmen jars on the mantelpiece and waited for everyone else to wake up.

I still remember the wonderful feeling I had when my family saw them and their surprise when they opened them up. 

The joy of giving. Do you remember feeling that for the first time? Please share your story in the comments – we’d love to hear it 

Sue Palmer

Welcome to the Great Expectations book study at Church of the Saviour!

Every year the start of the retail Christmas season gets earlier and earlier. Now it seems to be a common occurrence for Christmas decorations to appear on store shelves even before Halloween is upon us!

What is happening to Christmas? Do people still see this as a celebration of Christ’s birth, or just an opportunity to overindulge? Why do so many people dread the holidays? What should we be doing as Christians?

As a church we are going to delve into these questions by studying a book together as we enter the Advent season. The book is "Christmas is Not Your Birthday" by Mike Slaughter, UMC pastor of Ginhamsburg Church near Dayton, Ohio.

We will be studying the book together in small groups - some at church, some in homes. Home groups will meet three times before Christmas. Sign-ups for the groups will be available at church on Sunday, November 3. If you have any questions please call the church office at 216-321-8880.

Not only does this book look at what Christmas means to us, but following the example set by Ginghamsburg Church it explores sacrificial giving.  You can read about what this church was able to do through their giving here.

To read more about Pastor Mike Slaughter, check out his blog here.

  

Want to participate in a conversation outside your study group? 

Do you have resources or other book suggestions to share on this topic? 

Perhaps you already have experience of down-sizing Christmas and would like to share?

Or maybe you have some gritty questions on the topic that you're grappling with and would appreciate input?

For any of the above, you can post on this blog by clicking on the "No (or a number) comments" that is in purple under each post. If there are comments, you can hit "reply" and respond to any comment posted. Or, you can email cotsfastsandfeasts@gmail.com and I will post it on the blog for you :-)

Conversation helps us explore and go deeper, so I encourage you to use this blog as a tool to do just that.

A Practical Way to Help Feed the Hungry ...

Preparations are well under way for the Feed My Starving Children Mobilepack event that Church of the Saviour is hosting on May 18, 2013.  The Mobilepack is a day long church and community effort to purchase and pack 100,000 nutritionally balanced rice meals to be distributed to hungry children around the world.  It will take place in the Great Hall.

Teams are being formed to help with the preparations.  There are several teams already formed: a Disciple Class team, Contemporary Disciples team, a Cleveland Orchestra team.  Can you think of a team that you can put together? Maybe a Sunday School class team, a work team or a Family team.  Check out the website to see what is already being done.

from feedmystarvingchildren.org

Take time to think about how you can support this event financially.  We have raised about one third of the total amount needed so we still have more to raise.  Have you made your donation yet?  You can donate through the church office or through the website:

 http://fundraising.fmsc.org/ChurchoftheSaviour  

We know of several families that will be donating the money saved during their Lenten fast.  The children of Church of the Saviour will be hosting a pasta dinner fundraiser on April 5.  Do you have an idea of a way that you can help?

We are excited about this upcoming event.  We will make a difference to help the hungry.

from feedmystarvingchildren.org

Cindy Watson Sperl

Food Postcard from the Mission Field

Kevin Schaner is currently on a mission in Liberia on the African continent. Here is what she says about how Liberians eat:-

Liberians do not consider it a meal unless they have had rice. They eat white rice from China.

Meals are "soup" or we would call it a sauce of greens ( sweet potato, cassava), palm oil, cabbage over rice. Occasionally it may include chicken pieces, or whole pieces of fish with the head, tail, etc. 

Liberians eat one meal a day.  

Pineapples and butter pears (avacado) are in season. 

With no refrigeration, no dairy products.

A Prayer by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.

Help me to pray

And to concentrate my thoughts on you;

I cannot do this alone.

In me there is darkness,

But in you there is light;

I am lonely, but you do not leave me;

I am feeble in heart, but with you there is peace.

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

I do not understand your ways,

But you know the way for me…

Restore me to liberty,

And enable me to live now

That I may answer before you and before men.

Lord, whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

Amen.



(From  http://tinyurl.com/butdyvk)

Leaving the C Zone

Lent is not an easy journey to take. If we've been fasting, whether from food or from Face Book, then we've experienced a self-denial in some form. So practicing Lent gives us pause, and takes us out of our comfort zone.

Joshua Davis

Wikipedia defines 'comfort zone' as, "a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk."

Well, according to that definition, who would want to leave an 'anxiety-neutral' state? Who would want to choose 'risk' over 'no risk'? Who would want to step out of a culture that encourages self-absorption, concern with the frivolous, and avoidance of the needs of others?

In a very interesting article  Pau Vidal, a new priest working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kenya, talks about the three people Pope Benedict mentioned in his Ash Wednesday remarks. All three people were folks who stepped out of their comfort zones: Pavel Florensky, a brilliant Russian scientist who became an Orthodox priest and was eventually executed by the Russian State; Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who was killed in Auschwitz, and Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Vidal states, "these three provide a radical testimony of what it means to leave our comfort zones and let ourselves be transformed by the Spirit."

And, as Methodists, who better a role model of leaving our comfort zone than John Wesley himself. Wesley, an Anglican priest, had a good friend from college, George Whitfield. Whitfield was an evangelist who preached to the poor in England and America. After some persuasion, Wesley decided to join Whitfield preaching to coal miners, in the open, in Bristol. 

Wesley recounts,"I could scarce reconcile myself to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he [Whitefield] set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life till very lately so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church." (James M. Buckley, A History of Methodism in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898), 88-89.)

It has to be noted that, "coal mining was the most undesirable job available to anybody in 18th century England. They and their families lived in abject poverty. They were considered dirty and dishonest and violent. They were not welcomed in respectable Anglican churches. 
George Whitfield preached to the coal miners in an open field in Bristol. Good respectable Anglicans considered this an embarrassingly tacky thing to do" (http://www.foundryumc.org/sermons/9_21_2003.pdf.)

http://tinyurl.com/a6axkk5

But from this point on Wesley's spiritual life takes a sharp turn. Once he stepped out of his comfort zone (preaching to the clean, decorous congregants in beautiful churches) and took to open fields to bring God to the unchurched, outcast, dirty coal-miners, things changed for him. “Up to this point (in his spiritual life) the story is full of anxiety, insecurity, futility. Hereafter, the instances of spiritual disturbances drop off sharply and rarely recur, even in the full records of a very candid man” (Albert Outler, Editor, “John Wesley” (Oxford University Press), p. 17.) Preaching as he did to the miners led to the demise of his career as an Anglican priest, but it led to a spiritual awakening for him and he began to experience what salvation, forgiveness, grace and peace truly mean.

So, again, why would we want to leave our comfort zone? It seems that when we do, the Holy Spirit can work in us, transform us, and great things happen in the Kingdom of God. Wesley found himself preaching to groups as large as 3,000, made up of people who would never have been welcomed in a church. He brought God, education and hope to many who had been overlooked and discounted as unworthy by the ruling classes, and even the church.

Certainly there are risks to this. Wesley was considered a traitor to his class, Anglican priests reviled and resisted him, violent mobs broke up meetings and attacked the preachers.

Will fasting this Lent bring risks for us? Will turning to God and opening up ourselves to the Holy Spirit by leaving our comfort zone change us? 

What would leaving your comfort zone look like?

Sue Palmer