silence, song and prayer

     I remember as a little girl taking a very small amount of money and putting it in the offering plate at church on Sundays. I think that that was how I realized how churches operate; that churches needed our money to heat the building, to pay the minister and to buy the cookies for after the service. When our girls were small, they too brought a quarter or two to put in the collection--- in fact, it was a very important job to carry the offering plate from Sunday School around to the back of the church and then to proceed up that long aisle in the centre with the adults that were carrying the church collection, and to hand it up to the server to be blessed with everyone else's donation. Our daughters longed for it to be their turn and felt very special when doing it. It was a big, exciting opportunity that probably felt less big and less exciting the older they got or the more they did it....      Still, some things have not changed. Churches still need...

     Who do you pray for? We have a young friend who is battling cancer and whose bone marrow transplant took place about five weeks ago. There are good signs and we are hopeful. He is a boy who is already coping with challenges but who has a brave and strong set of grandparents who do a wonderful job of looking after him. His name has been on my lips for a couple of months now and prayers are said for him constantly, by me and others, at church and at home. We happily attended his and his grandmother's baptism and have thought of him every day since. We miss him but we can imagine him at the hospital, entertaining the nurses with his smart and funny conversation.      A retired minister who preaches at our church from time to time said last night in his sermon that he was not sure why bad things happened to good people but he was sure what good people do in bad times: they pray, they act, they do what needs to be done. Sometimes it's hard to know what that...