Good morning…
This Winter/Spring semester began yesterday. She began with a BAM!
I spoke in all three worship services, 8:30 am, 9:00 am, and 11:15 am, sharing the opportunities offered through our Women’s Ministry at Northside Church. Before and after each service, I enjoyed talking with longtime friends and staff members. Here is the invitation I extended.
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Good morning. My name is Sue Allen, and Christa Groves and I have led the Women’s Ministry here at Northside since 2008. That’s 18 fertile years!
We offer a wide array of weekly classes, hosted at church or in people’s homes, meeting mornings, afternoons, and evenings. We also host monthly gatherings, some social and some service-oriented, to fit easily into your schedule.
In addition, this semester there are two one-time events we don’t want you to miss.
- On Wednesday, January 28th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, I will host a discussion of one of my all-time favorite books, Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough by Kay Warren. Register, read the book and come on the 28th prepared to share your takeaways from this life-giving must-read. Then, the following Sunday, February 1st at 5:00 pm, we’ll enjoy an evening with Kay Warren, as she is the keynote speaker for the Suicide Prevention Summit at Peachtree Road Methodist. What an awesome opportunity!
- The next Sunday, on February 8th at 12:30 pm, we will host our “Ladies Legacy Luncheon” in the Watson Faith and Arts Center, celebrating 75 years of history. At Northside, we’ve served, studied, and raised our families together. We’ve prayed and visited, written notes and made meals, supporting each other through life’s joys and sorrows. On the 8th, we’ll gather to share stories and to create new memories built on our strong foundation of faith, family, and friendship. All ages are welcome, so bring yourself and your girlfriends, your daughters and your granddaughters, your mothers and your grandmothers.
To to browse descriptions and register for these fun opportunities, please visit the Women’s Ministry tab on our church website.
As Kay Warren writes in Choose Joy: “Most of you will not face anything as devastating as the loss of a child to suicide, but every single day you will face something that threatens your attempt to live with joy. Health problems, financial worries, marriage issues, loneliness, unresolved relational conflicts, anxiety about our nation or our world, stress over how your kids will turn out… Your primary task in life is to get to know God intimately and to send your spiritual roots deep into the soil of his love; to develop convictions and certainties about him that will become the source of your strength when happiness isn’t enough.”
For encouragement on our daily walk of faith, we need each other as women. We always have and we always will.
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After leaving the church around 12:45 pm, I headed home to finish the assigned reading for our first discussion of Wholehearted Faith by Rachel Held Evans. From 3:00 to 5:30 pm, we gathered at our friend’s home and a living room full of us unpacked zesty words like these: “In truth, my so-called spiritual journey still continues to meander, to circle…to evolve… I am a Christian, committed to practicing the way of Jesus, but in my heart, I still have so many questions, and I still have so many doubts.” (37)
After our study, I walked our dog, shopped for last minute groceries, and, at 6:30 pm, we welcomed into our home our couples’ small group. We enjoyed a homemade dinner and a lively discussion about the recent “fall from grace” of Christian author Philip Yancey. “To my great shame, I confess that for eight years I willfully engaged in a sinful affair with a married woman,” Yancey admitted this week. “My conduct defied everything that I believe about marriage. It was also totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings and caused deep pain for her husband and both of our families.” Unraveling our jumbled thoughts, we wondered aloud, “How will this long-standing affair impact Yancey’s legacy of faith? From his example, what might we learn?” The group left by 9:00 pm, and we cleaned up the kitchen by 9:30 pm.
This Winter/Spring semester began yesterday. She began with a BAM!
Do your planting in the morning and in the evening, too. You never know whether it will all grow well or whether one planting will do better than the other (Ecclesiastes 11:6, GNT).
…Sue…
