Still Christmas?

by Kay Byurstrom

Christmas… just that one word can bring different thoughts to your mind.  It conjures up wonderful memories for some of Christmas past, and yet for others the word would just as soon be erased. Christmas is not about what our society has made it to be.  It is about the celebration of our Lord Jesus Christ’s birthday, the day God reached down to earth to bring us to Himself by giving us His Son.

It is with this thought in mind that we as the moms and grandmas are asked to make our Christmas celebrations meaningful and memorable.  How do we do that with so much commercialism all around us?  Hit the BIG sales for things we think we really need? Stress over how to pay for everything?  Try to find time to buy and wrap the gifts, decorate the house and bake all the goodies?  We are exhausted by the time Christmas actually arrives!  There has to be a better way.

What can we do to relieve the pressure the world puts on us and concentrate on what is important and what really matters? 

First, our hearts have to be right with God.  We need to focus on Him… after all, it is His Day!  Spend time with Him each day and quiet your heart and mind.  Let Him speak to you and fill you with peace.  Then you can more easily discern what is important and what is not.

Make time for your children and grandchildren.  We can get so busy that we run out of our most precious commodity… time!  That is what they want more than anything.  Make some family traditions that center around playing and laughing together.  Bake cookies or some other family treat for the neighbors and get your kids involved in the making and the delivery.  Just sit and look at the Christmas lights on the tree and sing carols together or simply talk or be still.  Adopt a family to shop for, and get your children involved with the gift list.  Focusing on others helps us remember that Christ came to give Himself away.  Go caroling with the church and visit our shut-ins.  They are so lonely around the holidays and you can bring much joy to them by doing this simple activity.

As wives, mothers and grandmothers, we are the ones that set the tone for our homes.  If our families do not see the true meaning of Christmas in our homes, they probably won’t see Christmas at all.  So, this year, let’s all stay calm, let Christ’s peace rule in our hearts and take time to be still and hear God’s prompting.  This could be the best Christmas yet!

Stewardship

by Carol Supper

My mom faithfully attended church and took all 4 of us kids with her to the little white church on the corner of 147^th St. and California Ave. in the Chicago suburb of Posen, Illinois. From the time I was an infant until sometime during my college years, the Merrell family was present at Community Bible Church just about every time the doors were open. In fact, we often opened the doors!

At the age of 7 I accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of my life after hearing a message from two Evangelist brothers with the last name of Lindquist. I had been in Sunday School and church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night of my life, and on that particular evening it all made sense to me. 

So it is probably not surprising to any that the word “stewardship” was a part of my vocabulary from a very early age.  My understanding of that word, though, was very limited and remained quite obscure to me until a few years ago when a SGC Sunday School class had a guest teacher named Ned Kiser come and teach a quarter on that very word. I was quite surprised to discover that I really knew very little of Biblical Stewardship. 

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

 

Growing up in the church, I was fluent in “Christian Speak,” and words such as omniscience, born again, redeemed, and stewardship rolled easily off my tongue. I was always surprised when somebody would ask what I was talking about. “Doesn’t everybody know about atonement, the Holy Ghost, and propitiation?!” The word “stewardship” was just another word that Christians used that meant “giving.” whether it was money, time or talents.

Fast forward 20 years--okay maybe 40 years--and I am sitting in the HOPE SS class learning that stewardship means a whole lot more than that. In fact, I would have preferred to stay ignorant so I wouldn’t have to be held responsible! 

Disclaimer: if you do not want to be held responsible for changing your behavior to match your knowledge, STOP reading right now! 

Okay, you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

To understand stewardship, you need to understand what a steward is. The Free Dictionary says a steward is “One who manages another's property, finances, or other affairs.”  Notice that it does not say, “One who manages his own property, finances…” Okay, so what does that mean? It means that we are only managers and not owners. The owner is the Lord! "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it." (Psalm 24:1) 

Now that we understand what stewardship actually means, ask yourself a question. “Would I hire ME to manage my finances, my time, my abilities?” I am so blessed and grateful that my property owner is gracious and merciful…otherwise I would have been fired a long time ago. 

How are you going to respond? Do you need to change your “managing style”? Maybe you need to spend more time reading the textbook that tells you how to please the owner. You probably already have a copy of this book (perhaps even many!). Open your Bible…it has all the direction you need. It clearly tells us how to manage all that the Lord has given us in such a way that will make him want to say, “Well done, good and faithful steward.” One passage to start with is Matthew 25:13-30.

Once you come to grips with what needs to change in your life, it's time to teach these principles to your kids.  Naturally, you will have a lot to explain with your words, but your example will speak the most loudly to them!

It Takes a Church

by Dawn McCandless

My husband's childhood was very different from my own.  Tim grew up in a small town near Pittsburgh, surrounded by a large network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings.  He also lived in a close knit - both physically and emotionally - neighborhood where he never lacked playmates or houses of refuge when his own parents weren't home.  Eyes and ears were everywhere in the community; supervising, protecting, guiding, caring as Tim was nurtured here for the first seventeen years of his life. He now has precious memories of these years and times spent with influential adults in his young life.

I grew up in Dunlap.  We moved here from Indianapolis when I was seven.  It was the fourth home I had known since my birth. Not exactly a metropolis, the Elkhart-Goshen area felt safe and neighborly enough.  The job opportunity my father had just accepted allowed my parents to move my brother and me closer to their families in Michigan, still three hours away. We built a home in a new subdivision with few existing homes, and I entertained myself playing in the dirt piles of construction sites and selling lemonade to workers from my red wagon.  As our neighborhood grew, my family formed close friendships with a few other families, creating a substitute extended family within reach.  Forty years and many moves later, these relationships remain.

Tim and I are grateful for our childhood experiences. Different as they were from each other, for both of us, family was community; and community was family.  The security this sense of belonging gave us has been foundational.  Yet eventually, we each discovered our need for more and found that "more" in a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Today, as we raise our own children away from extended family, we still want to give our kids the sense of the community we had growing up.  We are thankful to have a church family that has given us just that. Through our church, we and our children have enjoyed multigenerational fellowship, a supportive environment for the values we hold dear, and the security of knowing a group of people who are "there" for us. On a more intimate level, we have been blessed with friends who have been closer to us than a brother or sister.  Their children have been our children's surrogate cousins.  We have been the "other mother" to each other's children and they all know that we are all watching, praying, and working together to keep them on the straight and narrow path.

Hilary Clinton tells us that it takes a village to raise a child.  While I don’t agree that the village’s government should dictate how I raise my child, I will concede that children are best raised as part of a larger culture than the nuclear family.  That’s why, in today's world, the church is more important than ever to our families. Higher education or job relocations move us away from relatives.  Busy-ness and air conditioning isolates us from our neighbors. An increasingly liberal mindset in our schools means we can't trust them to reinforce the Christian virtues we want our kids to learn. Internal and external pressures threaten the survival of our marriages and families. For our family, our relationship with Jesus, lived out among the community of believers at Sugar Grove Church, has been the solid rock we have built our home upon. More than a catch-phrase, Sugar Grove has truly been our family.

Hebrews 10:25 says "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Paul recognized how much we would need the Body...and more so in the Last Days. More critically than ever, our children need God's church. No doubt, we made many mistakes as parents, and will make more.  But I have never regretted raising them as part of the family of God.

Under Construction!!

Check back October 1, 2011. :)