Getting started...

I started a blog five years ago and my intention was to encourage people to stand up for themselves and do something instead sitting and doing nothing. It turned out more to be a rant when I got ticked off and I have deleted the blog. So now I've read some other people's blogs and decided I could have a blog too. Most of the time I feel like writing when I can't sleep.

This morning I was sitting on the back porch enjoying the peace and quiet and thinking about mission. I was in junior high school when the older adults in my church asked me to give minutes for mission. I really liked to do that because I learned so much about the church, not just my church, but the national and global church. I thank Leah Buckland for her constant prodding and encouragement for that! I soon was on my way to being a liturgist as well and I loved that too. That's how I started my public speaking.

So mission...I feel the heart of any church is it's mission. And mission within the church but also to your neighbors and beyond. What does mission look like? As I get older it adds more and more categories. Mission is about the "outside of the box" thinkers. I'm not always thinking outside the box but I always question why do we do this... fill in the blank. This summer mission for me was what I dream of! Seriously! I was an adult sponsor for our mission trip at church and mission was many things like providing a hot meal for community kids, yard work, cleaning debris off land of elderly people, scraping and painting a house, bible study, worship, song, dance, arts & crafts, recreation, storyteller, prayer shawl making (more on that later), prayer shawl giving, serenading, driving, late night talks, walking, climbing a mountain, and so on! Mission was all over us that week and how glorious to be in that presence!

I also was an adult sponsor (that's only by age because you know I'm one of the biggest kids working for God!) at Synod Youth Workshop (SYW). Our small group walked 2 blocks to a Methodist church to roll flyers and rubber band them and distribute them to a certain neighborhood within walking distance for the church's food bank. Maybe it's not the mission we had hoped but the church needed it done and we had a couple of encounters with people. But we had fun together learning about one another.

Mission... the heart of the church and the very essence of your soul!