Pastor’s Corner – January 2, 2024

Dear Beloved,

I hope you continue to enjoy Christmastide and the hope, love, joy, and peace of Jesus. I give thanks for you and the opportunities we’ve had to worship and serve God together in 2024. I’m grateful that we can pray together and for each other and the world. I’m grateful for those who have come before us, and I’m grateful for God’s mercy. For those of you who have known me for a bit, you know that I love opportunities for fresh starts. For me, I see the new calendar year and each new season of life, as an opportunity for a new beginning. I am reminded that God’s mercies are new all the time. Is there something that is yearning for refreshment and renewal in your life, a place you want to allow yourself to receive God’s grace, a new or different spiritual practice you’d like to try, a new perspective or attitude about something….? I pray that we can take our past experiences to God and allow God to use them - to help us be more and more transformed into the followers of Jesus we are invited to be - forgiven and free to more fully embrace and reflect God’s never-ending, ever-faithful, through-out-the-ages compassion and kindness. You are loved. You are cherished. May you feel God’s love leading you into 2025.  

  With gratitude for you and for God’s steadfast compassion,

        Sarah

Great is your mercy, O Lord;

    be gracious to me according to your justice.  Psalm 119:156

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.  Ephesians 2:8-9