The stories of Jesus that he told on the road through Samaria, between Galilee and Jerusalem, take on a distinctly practical tone. Jesus and his disciples have left the synagogues and familiarity of Galilee and are not yet at their ultimate destination of the temple in Jerusalem. They are in unfamiliar and hostile territory, but Jesus doesn’t rush through Samaria with a sense of urgency. If anything, he slows down. Takes his time. He begins to lay out a vision of the kingdom

In Mark 2, Jesus ends up in debate with some religious leaders because his disciples, while walking through a wheat field on the Sabbath, broke off some of the heads of grain to eat. A seemingly simple action to satiate hunger pangs while out and about. But for the Pharisees that were watching, this was not something to be tolerated or pardoned. The disciples of Jesus had violated the law by harvesting on the Sabbath. God had commanded rest and yet here’s the followers of Jes

We are so excited about our bottle drive because it is a beautiful collaboration across multiple ministries in the church and allows everyone to participate! Together, Global Response, Local Response, SPACYOUTH and Adventurekids invite you to bring bottles to the church on Sunday April 19 when you come to our Sunday Gathering, OR drop off bottles on Wednesday April 22 7:00-8:30pm during SPACYOUTH. Our youth regularly engage in Justice and Compassion, on their “Love in A

For over 500 years the Roman Empire utilized crucifixion as a means of punishment for those that they deemed a threat to their power and their sense of order. Thousands and thousands of people were executed on crosses all over the known world until the practice was outlawed in 337 CE. So many crucifixions. So many crosses. Yet, after 1700 years of history moving forward there is only one cross we still talk about. There is only one cross that has come to represent so much to

As a child, energy bubbled effortlessly with joy, and as an adult with a career in sport, I carefully trained energy for the demands of competition. More recently though, an illness wiped out my life. An energy crisis brought on by inflammation and metabolic dysfunction in every cell of my body, resulting in organ systems spiralling out of control. Every action of sustaining life – breathing, eating, thinking, sleeping, moving – challenged by energy deprivation. We eventual

As a child, energy bubbled effortlessly with joy, and as an adult with a career in sport, I carefully trained energy for the demands of competition. More recently though, an illness wiped out my life. An energy crisis brought on by inflammation and metabolic dysfunction in every cell of my body, resulting in organ systems spiralling out of control. Every action of sustaining life – breathing, eating, thinking, sleeping, moving – challenged by energy deprivation. We eventual

It’s all about buckets. There is a popular children’s story often used in school classrooms to teach the power of empathy, kindness, and compassion. When our bucket is full, we feel awesome. When our bucket is empty, we feel awful. Our goal is to have a full bucket (obviously) and become bucket-fillers, helping others achieve their goal as well. The metaphor can be stretched a thousand ways for better or worse, but my confession is that in my deep longing to feel love, bucket

Time. This elusive thing that seems to rush by quicker and quicker with each passing month. And if you’re anything like me, you try to grasp for more of it, willing it to slow down because it never feels like there’s quite enough. Not enough time in the workday, where the to-do list seems to get longer instead of shorter. Not enough time to spend with family and friends - not even enough time to send the quick text checking-in to say, ‘I’m thinking of you’. Not enough time to

I used to think that rest was related to sleep. It was something that was earned after working hard through the day and followed the expending of most of my energy. Rest was what happened when I just couldn’t push myself any further. The purpose of rest was to get sufficiently recharged so more work and productivity could happen. The result of this in my life was that I could never get enough rest to meet the ever-increasing demands I would place on myself. Instead of rest

When it comes to having faith, I often feel like Peter on the waves. Whether I like it or not, the world rages on around me and my attention is pulled to the fierceness of the storms: the pelting of the rain, the swirling black of the clouds, the howling of the wind. All of the worldly things that speak fear, distraction, or doubt into my heart and mind. And, like Peter, in the looking away I can feel what it is to be overcome. To begin to sink. And while Jesus reaches out, t