Tonight is Wednesday Night Interactive! Join other Foundations families during the dinner hour in room E 206. See more info in Danny's Covenant Chronicles below!
PRAYER:
SUNDAY, JAN. 29: In lieu of our typical Sunday School with Carter, we are going to be joining together in an hour of prayer together. Not only will we lift up those specific requests of class members, but also, as Carter said the last two weeks, those things which are "robbing us of our peace and joy, causing worry and anxiety, and making us gaze at our circumstances instead of eternity." Please think and pray on those things this week as we will discuss them at the beginning of class so we can lift these challenges and stumbling blocks up to the Lord. We hope everyone will join us in this special time together. Our class prayer coordinators, Barry and Karon Staples, have been wonderful to come up with this concept and bring it into place.
Prayer Requests from January 22:
Praise for a great women's social last week!
Caroline Woods' friend, Beth, having surgery on 1/25
Kelly Henderson - praise for a safe delivery of baby, prayer for transition to a new baby at home
Patra Trammell - unpacking from a move while very pregnant (due in less than 2 weeks)
Pray for our Sunday School hour of prayer this week
Prayer for our new Church Officers
BIBLE STUDY/PRAYER TIME FOR LADIES OF FOUNDATIONS:
"Stronger Together" is the idea behind the women in our Sunday School class getting together for Bible study and prayer time the first Wednesday of each month, starting next Wednesday, February 1st in the Bride's Room (underneath the sanctuary) from 9:00-10:15am. Childcare is provided in the nursery by reservation, so please let Julie Martin (874-7863 or themartins2@earthlink.net) know if you will need it. Mary Williamson has graciously agreed to teach us through Titus 2:4-5 which talks about older women teaching the younger to "love their husbands and children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored". We will be studying these concepts over the next few months and praying for one another so that we are not just surviving day to day but living with victorious joy and peace in the various roles God has given us. Many thanks to Julie and Mary for their coordination and willingness to lead this study just for the ladies of our class!
MISSIONS:
Roddy and Katherine Taylor, our class Missions Coordinators, are hard at work on activities for our class to participate in during Missions Week which is at the end of February. They will open up their home on Tuesday, February 28th at 6:30 p.m. for our class to meet and have dessert with two guest missionaries, Tim and Theresa Simpson (East West Ministries - Middle East/Russia) and John and Samantha Hudson (100 Fold - Montana). So, save the date of Tuesday, Feb 28! Their address is 1868 Southwood Road in Vestavia. If you are like most of Birmingham, you probably did not get a full night's sleep on Sunday evening. There were 8 legs in our king bed initially, then 8 legs in our queen bed in the basement at approximately 3:30 am, then just two legs (my own) on the couch as I was able to actually rest for about 45 minutes before everyone awoke for the day! But thankfully that is the only thing most of us lost—sleep. The broader Birmingham community (Centerpointe, Clay, Trussville) got hit pretty hard again. As part of our Covenant Cares we will again accept donation for Christian Service Mission. As of today, they need garbage bags, cleaning products, storage tubs and food for tornado victims. Bring any of them you can tonight and tomorrow and we'll have a crew take them down to CSM's warehouse before the weekend.
COVENANT CHRONICLES FROM DANNY GIFFEN:
If you are like most of Birmingham, you probably did not get a full night's sleep on Sunday evening. There were 8 legs in our king bed initially, then 8 legs in our queen bed in the basement at approximately 3:30 am, then just two legs (my own) on the couch as I was able to actually rest for about 45 minutes before everyone awoke for the day! But thankfully that is the only thing most of us lost—sleep. The broader Birmingham community (Centerpointe, Clay, Trussville) got hit pretty hard again. As part of our Covenant Cares we will again accept donation for Christian Service Mission. As of today, they need garbage bags, cleaning products, storage tubs and food for tornado victims. Bring any of them you can tonight and tomorrow and we'll have a crew take them down to CSM's warehouse before the weekend.
What's Happening
1. Tonight is Wednesday Night Interactive – Join us for week two this evening as Bill Boyd will be teaching on Doctrine, Piety and Cultural Transformation. Seeing his white board skills is something not to be missed—plus we have a new whiteboard!!!! We had a capacity crowd last week, so sit near the front if you can so late comers (we know who you are) can still squeeze in. It's chili night with Ingram's café with corn dogs for the kiddos at 5:30. 6:30 begins teaching/worship. Also of note: Jr. High meets at 6:30 along with Children and Chancel Choir. Music Clubs and Jubilate begin at 5.
2. New Member's Class – Wow! We are expecting our largest class ever for the February new member's class. Plan is to meet Feb. 3-4 in the Fellowship Hall due to space. Please contact Victoria at vwilliams@covpres.com today if you still need to sign up.
3. Pastor's Lunch Study – Danny Giffen will be leading a discussion through the book, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places by Chuck DeGroat beginning next Wednesday, Feb. 1. Noon to 1 pm in E201/03. You can pick up your books now in his office, pick up on the first day or buy at amazon now. Books are $11/ea. And should make for a great dialogue. Oh yeah, lunch is free…men and women!!!
4. First Monday Lunch Bunch - First Monday Lunch Bunch will meet Monday, February 6, at 11:45 a.m. in room E206.
Donna Nathan will be our speaker. Lunch is $6 and childcare is available by reservation (871-7004) for children age 5 and under.
5. Missions Conference – Make sure to sign up for volunteer positions and hosts for during Feb. 24-29th. Ed Hartman with MTW Romania is our guest preacher. See Phyllis with any questions or help. Also see Chris Freeman chrisfreemanca@gmail.com if you are interested in short term trips for 2012: Honduras, Ukraine, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Australia, Maine/New Hampshire, Turkey.
Theology 101
Thomas Merton on “Freedom”
“To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency.
It is true, the freedom of my will is a great thing. But this freedom is not absolute self-sufficiency. If the essence of freedom were merely the act of choice, then the mere fact of making choices would perfect our freedom. But there are two difficulties here.
First of all, our choices must really be free—that is to say, they must perfect us in our own being. They must perfect us in our relation to other free beings. We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. From this flows the second difficulty: we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves.
Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like.
On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time. This would never be so if my will had not been created to use its own freedom in the love of others.
My free will consolidates and perfects its own autonomy by freely co-ordinating its action with the will of another. There is something in the very nature of my freedom that inclines me to love, to do good, to dedicate myself to others. I have an instinct that tells me that I am less free when I am living for myself alone. The reason for this is that I cannot be completely independent. Since I am not self-sufficient I depend on someone else for my fulfillment. My freedom is not fully free when left to itself. It becomes so when it is brought into the right relation with the freedom of another.
At the same time, my instinct to be independent is by no means evil. My freedom is not perfected by subjection to a tyrant. Subjection is not an end in itself. It is right that my nature should rebel against subjection. Why should my will have been created free, if I were never to use my freedom?
If my will is meant to perfect its freedom in serving another will, that does not mean it will find its perfection in serving every other will. In fact, there is only one will in whose service I can find perfection and freedom. To give my freedom blindly to a being equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If I do, in fact, obey other men and serve them it is not for their sake alone that I will do so, but because their will is the sacrament of the will of God. Obedience to man has no meaning unless it is primarily obedience to God. From this flow many consequences. Where there is no faith in God there can be no real order; therefore, where there is no faith obedience is without any sense. It can only be imposed on others as a matter of expediency. If there is no God, no government is logical except tyranny. And in actual fact, states that reject the idea of God tend either to tyranny or to moral chaos. In either case, the end is disorder, because tyranny is itself a disorder. The immature conscience is not its own master. It is merely the delegate of the conscience of another person, or of a group, or of a party, or of a social class, or of a nation, or of a race. Therefore, it does not make real moral decisions of its own, it simply parrots the decisions of others. It does not make judgments of its own, it merely “conforms” to the party line. It does not really have motives or intentions of its own. Or if it does, it wrecks them by twisting and rationalizing them to fit the intentions of another. That is not moral freedom. It makes true love impossible. For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another? It is not mine to give!
Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon our liberty. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it.
Since money is what it is, I do not deny that you may be worthy of all praise if you light your cigarettes with it. That would show you had a deep, pure sense of the ontological value of the dollar. Nevertheless, if that is all you can think of doing with money you will not long enjoy the advantages that it can still obtain.
It may be true that a rich man can better afford to throw money out the window than a poor man, but neither the spending nor the waste of money is what makes a man rich. He is rich by virtue of what he has, and his riches are valuable to him for what he can do with them.
As for freedom, according to this analogy, it grows no greater by being wasted, or spent, but it is given to us as a talent to be traded with until the coming of Christ. In this trading we part with what is ours only to recover it with interest. We do not destroy it or throw it away. We dedicate it to some purpose, and this dedication makes us freer than we were before.”
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
