Hello loved ones.  My prayer for us this week is that we find ways to live in the community that God designed us for despite the enforced separation we are all subject to at this time.  Remember always that He loves you and so do we.

Last week was our first attempt at online only services.  we did have a few watching, but I think it might have been a little confusing for some and we do have people who don’t use computers or smartphones or don’t feel comfortable with them.

To help with that, this week we are adding a dial-in conference line so that more people can participate and it will be easier to share with each other.  We will continue the Facebook live session, but the phone line will be available for anyone who would like to participate that way.  Sadly, do to the potential for miscreants to obtain and misuse the number, I will not post it publicly.  Each of our regular members should have been contacted by now and given the number.  If you don’t have it and want it, you can leave a message from the contact form on this site or leave a message on our Facebook page and we’ll be happy to share it.  Those who have it are also free to share it with anyone you think would like to join us who normally cannot come to church.  I am going to try to make sure Kelvin gets a chance to call in.  Depending on the situation there, maybe people would like to join him who are deprived of whatever services may be provided to the residents by people who are not allowed to come right now.

We’ll keep it simple like we did last week with a time of prayer and a message.  After we are finished, I will be happy to leave the line open as long as people want to chat.  It’s not the 5th Sunday fellowship we had in mind, but we do what we can with what we have.  You may also submit prayer requests via the web site or the Facebook page to be shared with the church.  Of course you can always contact me directly.

I’ll try to keep the message a little shorter.  During this time of separation, it’s all the more important that we find ways to be in fellowship with one another.  God created us for community.  He Himself is three in one!  From the beginning of creation we were not meant to be alone.  When God made the world, you might remember that after each day He “saw that it was good.”  But do you remember the one thing he said was not good?  After He made Adam, He said, “”It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18)  Now it isn’t that God thought He was all done and then realized He’d missed something.  He did it this way to teach us the importance of the concept.

Later Solomon would write in Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 about the strength and protection that is found when there is more than one.  We find the early church meeting together both in places of worship and in their homes sharing meals.  The author of Hebrews exhorts us not to give up assembling together (Heb 10:24-25.)  It is that last passage that some have taken as grounds for disobeying the rules governments have put in place in their efforts to prevent the spread of the corona virus.  We’re not there yet for several reasons, which I briefly discussed last week.

How can we endeavor to live together as God intended during this time?  we pray it will be short, but I hope the lessons we learn will last a very long time.  It’s not just during this period of crisis that we need to be looking out for each other, especially those who were isolated even before it began.  Let’s strive to live in community in new and better ways long after this current storm has blown over.

Join us Sunday!

Love y’all,

Larry