Spiritual Ramblings

Eating the Wedding Cake on Doug and Cheri’s first anniversary

Sunday Service 09-18-2011

Scout Charter Sunday Sept. 4 2011

Food Ministry 2011-08-11

It is traditional at our church for one of the Elders or one of the members to give their testimony on the Sunday after Easter. There were many services over the week preceding Easter and it gives our Rector a week without preparing a sermon. This Year, Father Paul asked me to do it, and it is really a tribute to my Parents.

Yesterday, May 15 was the birthday of folk singer and activist Utah Phillips, born in Cleveland, Ohio (1935).

He said: “I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can’t live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now. I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble.”

More on “The Writer’s Almanac” May 15 2011

The Smile by William Blake from The Writer’s Almanac May 10, 2011.

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit;
And there is a smile of smiles,
In which these two smiles meet.

(And there is a frown of hate,
And there is a frown of disdain;
And there is a frown of frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain, (Continued on The Writer’s Almanac, May 10 2011)

She was poor but she was honest,
Victim of a rich man’s whim,
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she lost her honest name.

Then she ran away to London,
For to hide her grief and shame;
There she met another squire,
And she lost her name again. Continue reading Today’s Poem from Writer’s Almanac

Marvelous food ministry on December 21 – it was the day we distributed the toys from the Children’s Toy Drive
- More successful this year than last. Thanks once again to Danielle and Billy Dewitt, primarily. With the whole Dewitt family helping out. Praise the Lord!

Here are the Slides!

Born this day, May 20, 1806 was the man who said:

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” John Stuart Mill (books by this author) born in Pentonville, London (1806).

He wrote On Liberty in 1859. More information on “The Writers Almanac” May 20, 2010

Marvelous Poem on Writer’s Almanac today was “Ode to Chocolate” – The perfect poem for My Dear Wife, a Chocolate Lover

by Barbara Crooker

I hate milk chocolate, don’t want clouds
of cream diluting the dark night sky,
don’t want pralines or raisins, rubble
in this smooth plateau. I like my coffee
black, my beer from Germany, wine
from Burgundy, the darker, the better.

(Continued on The Writer’s Almanac April 24, 2010)

Here is a marvelous little poem written by Dorothy Oden, the senior member of our little Bible study group. She is also one of the lay readers at our church and is constantly serving. She is the prime greeter for our Food Ministry too. Written in 2001, Dorothy read this for our group yesterday, nearly all of it from memory! When she had trouble getting the last line right, she wrote it all out later – I think it is GREAT.

January 30, 2010. Today is the birthday of the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born in Hyde Park, New York (1882). He said,

“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”