February 1, 2012

Dear Family of faith,
This Sunday we are celebrating your birthday at a special party in Fellowship Hall following worship! I hope that you can be there! We are so excited about the Birthday Blessing Party, and everybody involved is excited about decorating, preparing the food, and welcoming the guests. It's really all about gratitude, about thinking about how old you will be in 2012 and being grateful to God for all those years of life. Sometimes we forget how blessed we are until we see others who are not so fortunate. My educational cruise allowed me to meet some people who made me grateful for what I have in my life. Take the energetic school boys who were selling little bags of peanuts on the pier in Barbados to earn money to buy school books. There was Mary Elizabeth, a weather-beaten and weary, elderly woman dressed far too heavily for the blazing sun, dragging her beaded chokers and necklaces around the beach to make a few bucks to survive. There was the creative rasta man with dreadlocks, peddling miniature steel drums made from used coffee cans, crassly painted and beaten in on one end, on the streets of Antigua. There was Cameron, the enterprizing beach boy who spent his days renting beach chairs and umbrellas and throwing in a free rum punch to get the tourist business on the sands of St. Maarten. Finally there was Jokim, our smiling, perceptive waiter from India, who left a wife and two growing children at home for the past 9 years so that he could spent 9 months each year on the cruise ship wait staff, serving irritating tourists and throwing away enough food each day to feed a small village in his own country, just so that he could feed and clothe his own family. All these people I met made me realize how blessed I am. I didn't have to sell peanuts to go to school. I didn't have to peddle beads or little drums or beach chairs to feed my family, nor did I have to be gone 9 months of every year to do it. I'm so glad that I didn't. I think that's what this birthday party is all about. I hope you will join me and Jill in bringing a gift in your envelope to express in a symbolic way what no amount of money can buy-- that God has blessed us more than we know.