Message from Light of God Ministry • Reverend Mary White
Merry Christmas
Advent is a lesson in patience and is most difficult for the young whose time seems to linger forever. As we advance in years and appreciate that no situation lasts forever, patience comes easier. Lying in pause for the next adventure that life offers, we relish the grace of time. Accepting that we are our past experiences, it is much simpler to exist in the gift of now.
Church Seasons come and go, and we are about to move from Advent to the Christmas Season. This new season is a time of incarnation, an occasion to choose a personal fresh birth, additional growth, and unfamiliar encounters.
With Love,
Reverend Mary
Merry Christmas Everyone!
This fourth week of Advent with the wonderful theme of LOVE is almost complete, and Christmas is almost here!
We are so fortunate to be recipients of God's love and we remember the great gift showing us that love when we remember the birth of Jesus at this time of year.
I pray that you can feel the presence of God's love in your work, school, and home.
This week the Parent Tot video has the reading of two books: one about a Christmas celebration for a mouse, and one about the birth of Jesus. The songs this week are the two Advent songs we have been repeating during this season: It's About Hope, and Hope is a Star, as well as When Santa Got Stuck in the Chimney, Away in a Manger, and We Wish You A Merry Christmas.
The Family Fun video has a reading of the book, Moostletoe and a poem about Jesus' birth, the Advent songs we have done each week: I've Got the Hope and Light One Candle for Hope, as well as Silver Bells, Jingle Bells, Alleluia, and Feliz Navidad.
May you experience hope, peace, joy and love on Christmas day 2022.
Brenda Pielle
Reaching Out to Families
Powell River United Church
A Kids United Christmas Message from Elsie & Marilynn
We wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, especially the children who attended Kid’s United this past fall.
It is great being together again. Thank you to all the parents for bringing the young people.
A note just to let everyone know, there will be no Kid’s United until Sunday, January 8, 2023.
Hope to see everyone at the Christmas Eve Service.
Love Elsie and Marilynn
READING Excerpt from “Doing December Differently”
by Nicola Slee & Rosie Miles
Seeing Differently
Most recently I have been watching the light changing through the day. Moments of special lighting effects are often very fleeting as the sun interacts with the contours of a building, field or tree. Over months the changes are huge. I knew, of course, that the sun moved through the year but it has taken me 48 years to appreciate just how far the position changes, for example, from a summer sunset to a winter one. There are so many moments in time as light, colour, vegetation and wildlife change throughout the year. I wonder if I am experiencing the same excitement that the ancients felt as they watched for the solstice sunlight on their stones.
Waiting for the moment. Waiting an hour or a week or a month. Waiting with endurance, as wildlife photographers do, always hoping to be ready at the moment the longed-for one comes. (Those with the largest budgets can get technology to wait instead, but is that the same photographic event?).
All this leaves me wondering how I would photograph Christmas. What a huge theme. No one image could possibly begin to capture it all. Perhaps my prayer is that we would all expand inwardly, rather than outwardly, taking something to our hearts and minds as if for the first time.
– Bridget Woollard
POEM Ideal World
Excerpt from “The Visitor” by Joneve McCormick
Many have longed to be free, self-governing, safe, in a space where every being has a place and is understood – a heaven here and now.
Plato had in mind a realm ruled by wise philosophers; he said poets could not be allowed, were hard to lead and told stories of gods and goddesses, how they lived before, some say, man fell to earth.
Others, mostly from the East, teach how to get one’s self back and the freedom that comes with that.
For as long as it takes a seeker must look within for truth and experience the karmic rule that over time inflow equals outflow like the breath -- for everyone and everything – there is only now.
PRUC Online Worship Service
Please Join us this Sunday, December 25th
PRAYER
LOVING ONE
Calling your friends in new and unexpected ways, choosing Mary from the powerless and unnoticed in the world, yet greatly loved and cherished in your sight, that she should be the mother of the Messiah, so fill us with your grace that we too may accept the promptings of your Spirit, and welcome your angel with glad and open arms, ready to be pierced with pain and filled with joy, rejoicing in the cost of your deliverance, in and through the same Jesus our Messiah.
AMEN
– Jim Cotter