Love, Connect and Share

Love, Connect, and Share .... This is basically the motto that my church has. I am very blessed to go to a church that realized the importance of not only loving one another as Jesus has loved us -but also the importance of us as Christians connecting with one another. I go to a pretty large church - it has 3 services - early service, a young adult service, and 3rd service. Anyone is welcome at any of these services. With it being such a large church it might feel a little overwhelming to someone coming into the church to get to know people - but this is another area that my church is shining in - we have many different Sabbath School and many of them are discussion type Sabbath Schools. These are smaller groups of people so you can get to know your class mates. Not only are there Sabbath schools - but there are many small groups. Participating in these small groups gives you another way to get to know people. Sharing is also very important to our church. There are many different ministries in our church - I will only be sharing about 2 of them that I participate in. We have a big food pantry once a month- For November - we served about 240 families and about 750 people. We always have a good amount of people show up to volunteer to serve our community. And we even have people in our community that show up to help that are not members of our church, but they want to help and they are included as well. We also have a special food pantry that is specially geared to people in the community that are 55 and older. This program is also once a month. There are programs in our church that provide water for the homeless during the summer and sleeping bags and coats and such during the winter. I think as we study the life of Jesus we will realize that it was very important to him as well to love, connect, and share with his fellow man. I am thankful that God lead me to my church about 1 1/2 years ago- the time has flown by. I am blessed by sermons that uplift Jesus and encourages us along our spiritual journey so get better acquainted with Jesus. A personal relationship with Him is very important.

Happy Sabbath

Happy Sabbath

Learning for a Lifetime

I was raised in the Seventh-day Church. And yet it has still taken me many years to learn some of the important things to learn like love, grace and mercy. I truly believe that our walk with the Lord will last our whole lives with many, many things that we need to learn. Maybe I am hard headed or it's just hard for me to get certain concepts, but I have found that I have learned things over the last 10 years that I should have learned long ago.

Today I want to share a bit of my testimony with you. About 10-11 years ago - I started going to some 12 step type meetings being held at my church. We had a couple in our church who had been addicted to drugs and drinking and they had come through the 12 steps and found freedom from addiction. And then they found the Adventist church. They began a ministry at our church by doing these meetings. I will always be so grateful to them for this ministry. These meetings is how I finally learned the importance of turning my life and my will over to God. Surrendering your life to Him is vitally important. As long as we hold on tight to our lives and the way we want to do things- He doesn't have the opportunity to work the changes in our characters. And trust me our characters need major renovations, I know mine does. This old world is so far away from what God intended this world to be like - it is because of sin - sin only brings destruction and a downward bent to our characters. We need the strength and power from Jesus in order to make the changes needed- and He needs willing hearts to do the work. We need to become as clay - surrendered to the Potter. This is the only way that He can create us into something beautiful!

I hope that you will considering giving your life, heart and soul to Jesus today. May you give Him permission to transform you into His image. May God richly bless you today and everyday as you give Him the freedom to work in your life! :O)