Let’s Go Fly A Kite!

This Sunday, April 29, we will have a day of fun and fellowship in the park after the 10:30 service. We hope you’ll join us!

The Details: We’ll meet near the football fields at Moss Wright park around 12:30pm. Bring lunch for you and your family (and chairs and blankets, too). Also, bring a kite if you’d like to participate in our Kite Contests!

Kite Contests? Yes, we will have a few different kite contests. There may even be some fun prizes. One contest will be for the most creative handmade kite,* so get out your craft supplies, but don’t leave us for Pinterest just yet. We’ll also have a contest for the longest flight and the longest tail.*

Don’t know how to make a kite? Neither did we, but we found this fun video:

If you want a how-to that is slightly more challenging, check out this site, which features 27 different kinds of kite instructions (Did you know there are 27 different kinds of kites?).

You may have your own kite-flying strategy, but we’ve heard it’s great to have your back to the wind and have a partner toss the kite into the air to get it started. And of course, stay away from trees!

So, in the words of Mr. Banks, “Let’s go fly a kite!“

*All kites must be able to fly.

Thrill of Hope

A new sermon series, beginning December 11:

Do you remember being a child and enduring the agonizing wait for Christmas – counting down the days until December 25? It always seemed like it just took forever for Christmas to be here. The few days right before Christmas were like the longest days of the year. Now it seems to come more and more quickly, but when we were kids, it was so slow! And the great thing was, no matter how slow it went and no matter how long it seemed to take until we got to Christmas, we always got there. Right? There was the promise of the certainty of Christmas morning.

You may know this, or this may be new information, but for generations, generations, generations—many, many, many generations—there was always a handful of Jewish people who waited every single day for the arrival, not of Santa Claus, but of a Messiah. In every single generation, there was a group of people wondering if this could be the day that the Messiah arrives. But unlike the certainty of our Christmas, this went on for generation after generation after generation and nothing happened; 99.999% of these people who waited and waited and waited for the coming of the Messiah died, and there was no fulfillment of that promise. And they prayed, and they waited, and they remained faithful. And while many of the Jews kind of peeled off into other things, and abandoned their faith, and thought the Messiah must have been a fairy tale and a myth, there was always a group that got up every day and lived as if this could be the day that the Messiah shows up.

This Christmas, we are going to explore the story of people who waited patiently for that first Christmas and discover how they reacted when it happened. In the midst of those stories, we are going to look at our own story and see how this Christmas really can bring back the “Thrill of Hope” to our lives.