I have a new hobby creating high-quality, professionally bound photo albums of family pictures using the user-friendly software of Snapfish.com. I’ve taken to creating baby books to document the first years of each of our sons’ lives. I’ve also begun to create “yearbooks” to document and to celebrate wherever the Havels go and whatever we do from year to year. This means I spend a lot of time looking at old photographs.
Recently, a couple of pictures in particular caught my attention. Strangely enough, they were pictures of myself. The reason they caught my attention was that I appeared as happy and relaxed and as full of life as I can remember looking in so many of the hundreds of the pictures I’d been screening lately.
It was no surprise that these were recent pictures – ones taken during a week of vacation with extended family and during another weekend away from home, where I presided at the wedding of an old, high school friend. Like I said, I was utterly happy, completely relaxed, as full of life and as surrounded by friends and family as I had been in quite awhile. In those pictures, I look the way I believe God created me to be.
My discovery was a blessing for me and a reminder and encouragement for the summer’s Sabbath that is fast approaching our life together at Cross of Grace. Every year, we deliberately embrace the longer days and warmer weather of summer by allowing the pace of the congregation’s life to slow down. Our choirs stop rehearsing, many of our midweek Bible studies break, our Sunday school and Grace Quest programs take a summer vacation, and so on.
My prayer is that each of us experiences the fullness of God’s grace through whatever family and friends we’ll share time with in the months to come. I pray we’ll look for and find God in our homes and in whatever travels we make. My hope is weekly worship will be a part of the way we celebrate those gracious gifts. And I have faith in God’s willingness and ability to bless our lives and the ministry we share, all along the way.
See you in worship,
+Mark
