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Our Future Mission

a special blog from our Council President, Doug Odell

In an email to the bishop last December I described how the Holy Spirit has worked through Holy Cross to connect us with our neighbors:

We took an empty building and made La Casita, a place for the neighborhood to meet, to check out children’s books, and to learn in our garden. We built a relationship with Washington Elementary, providing school supplies, volunteers, and food for 30 homeless kids on the weekends. The neighborhood comes to our gym for movie nights, coat giveaways, and clothing exchanges. Our building is used for basketball, wedding receptions and zumba. Roughly 150 people attended our last Thanksgiving Eve potluck, with 90 staying for the service. They weren’t all church members, from either Holy Cross or Manantial de Aguas Vivas. Many were our neighbors, who heard good things were going on at our church. Continue reading “Our Future Mission”

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The Lord Bless you

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We are blessed people. Today our lives hit a wrinkle (Pastor Joe and Pastor Patricia). We made a choice to go on a continuing Education adventure to see the Holy Land! And, we are presently stuck in Istanbul on a 7 hour delay. Well, darn. But we have food, and water, and wifi (!) so maybe we should suck it up and make the best of it.

But today I write to my friends out there enduring change, and worry, and also, imagining new things, and dreaming of possibilities for ministry. Because the Annual Meeting is at hand, and I will miss it!

Continue reading “The Lord Bless you”

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Deathbed advice

This is us is back on tv. Its a show about a family of triplets – yes it is a LONG story. But in this week’s episode, Randall, who is the voice of morality, the voice of his father (both of them) the voice of vision, spoke to a pastor in a diner.

The pastor said this – “I give a lot of deathbed advice.”  And then he said, (ok I didn’t take it all down word for word), “when you make a hard decision, think about you, old and gray, laying with a pink nursing home blanket over you. Think about what you did in your life that makes you smile. That makes your dad proud.”  Well, yes. Continue reading “Deathbed advice”

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Baptized in the Jordan

You never know what people are going to say – This week I was in a doctor’s office (nice guy) and mentioned I was going to travel to Israel next week. He immediately told me, “My son went to Israel and was able to be baptized in the Jordan”. He was thrilled, clearly to share that with me, and I had many questions, but kept them to myself. “How wonderful” I replied. And the doctor wished me a blessed trip.  Continue reading “Baptized in the Jordan”

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Lutheranism 101 – The Bible

Essentials of Faith. If you wrote a list of essentials of faith, what would it include? Worship, Catechism, The Bible, fellow believers? Just as each of us learn in an individualized way to read, or write, or do math, so we each learn about Faith in our own way. But the Bible is a central piece of that. God gave us a legacy of documents (yes, they were individual documents before they were compiled) and we have learned about Faith and God and ourselves from them for thousands of years. This statement has a lot of ‘weight’ to it, though, doesn’ t it? I meet people all the time who are so intimidated by the enormity of the Bible that they have never gotten the bravery together to study the Bible, or even read it for pleasure. And, in my experience, folks ‘build a wall’ of their own perceived inadequacies as far as the Bible, and keep their distance from the Bible as though it had an electric fence around it. That’s too bad. Continue reading “Lutheranism 101 – The Bible”