Recently shared with our Facebook page, Laura invited us to check out what the World Council of Churches has been up to this year. Full of gorgeous pictures and moving stories, it’s worth a read. Thanks for sharing, Laura!
Sunday, April 27
This week, Meghan Brown Saavedra, Minister of Discipleship Ministries and Youth, Trinity Presbyterian Church Kanata, encourages us to read Revelation through new eyes – with the love and hope brought to us on Easter morning.
Read MoreHe is risen in the morning;
he is risen from the dead;
he is laughter after sadness;
he is light when night has fled.
He has suffered; he has triumphed;
life is his alone to give:
as he gave it once, he gives it
evermore, that we may live.
At the dawning of salvation (Book of Praise 248)
Photo by stock images
Pause Table - this week!
To help the hard-working students at Carleton during their exams, we’re helping out at the Pause Table. St. Andrew’s date to help during exams is Friday, April 25, 10 am-2 pm, let us know if you’re able to help out. Suggested food gifts: homemade sandwiches, cookies, muffins, lots of bagels and bananas (these are very popular items: portable!), juice, yogourt.
An important way to serve our students, this comment from Facebook:
So im starting to run the lines of broke and today was going to buy a lunch i cant afford, and free lunches were handed out by the prespyterian church in the uni center. Idk if its exams or hormones but i wanted to cry
#greatful
Students, grab a quick nutritious snack in the Atrium during exams to help fuel your brain.
Photo by freeimages.com
Sunday Lunch - Easter Sunday
I always feel as though Holy Week is a holy rush. The speed with which we turn from palms and Hosannas on Palm Sunday, to betrayal and arrest on Maundy Thursday and death on Good Friday strikes me, every year, as astonishingly rapid, leaving the worshipper, the mourner on Good Friday wondering, “How? How did this happen?” It is as though we are running from the moment Christ enters Jerusalem only to stop abruptly at Golgotha. But Sunday morning, as Rev. Milton Fraser so delightfully put it today, we lace our shoes back on and the running begins anew. Disciples – male and female – run to and from the tomb. Running to investigate, running to report, running in confusion, running in fear, running in joy. After the literal dead-stop of Friday and Saturday, such rushing and running on Sunday is a beautiful juxtaposition: lively and energetic compared with the stillness of despair and death.
But, as Milton pointed out, the importance of the running of Easter Sunday is not limited only to that long-ago Resurrection Day, but is a valuable symbol for us today. What, Milton asked from the pulpit, would the church look like if we strapped on our own metaphorical running shoes and ran out into the world? What would it mean for us to pick up the ideas Jesus laid down, and run with them? How would it change what it means to be church if we injected that same enthusiasm, that same abandon, that same energy despite fear and unknowing and unsurety into how we exist as a community?
Just as Mary Magdelene knew Jesus when he called her by name, so too do we know Christ’s call when we apprehend that is a personal call, one intended for us by One who knows us intimately, deeply, truly. When we hear that call and know Him, it is time – in joy, in spirit, in fear and in courage – to start running.
Darlene M.