Dear Friends,
Our Harvest Festival on Sunday was a wonderful success, the
Church looked absolutely beautiful, and I was
so encouraged by people’s generosity. The sale of goods after the
service raised over a hundred pounds, and there were many bags and boxes of
goods to be taken to Factory Row.
Harvest is about
celebrating God’s generosity to us, but in turn our response to that is
to be generous to others.
John Claypool in Life
Isn't Fair, Thank God, tells of an old rabbinic parable about a
farmer that had two sons. As soon as they were old
enough to walk, he took them to the fields and he taught them
everything that he knew about growing crops and raising animals. When he got too
old to work, the two boys took over the chores of the farm and when the father
died, they had found their working together so meaningful that they decided to
keep their partnership. So each brother contributed what he could and
during every harvest season, they would divide equally what they had corporately
produced. As the years rolled by, the elder brother never married and
became an old bachelor. The younger
brother did marry and had eight wonderful children.
Some years later when they were having a wonderful harvest,
the old bachelor brother thought to himself one night, "My brother has ten
mouths to feed. I only have one. He really needs more of this harvest than
I do, but I know he is much too fair to renegotiate. I know what I'll do.
In the dead of the night when he is already asleep, I'll take some of what I
have put in my barn and I'll slip it over into his barn to help him feed his
children.
At the very time he was
thinking down that line, the younger brother was thinking to himself,
"God has given me these wonderful children who will support me as I grow old.
My brother hasn't been so fortunate. He really needs more of this harvest
for his old age than I do. But I know him, he's much too fair. He'll
never renegotiate. I know what I'll do. In the dead of the night
when he's asleep, I'll take some of what I've put in my barn and slip it over
into his barn."
And so one night when the moon was full, as you may have
already anticipated, those two brothers came face to face, each on a mission of
generosity.
The old rabbi said that even though there wasn't a cloud in
the sky, a gentle rain began to fall. You know what it was? God weeping
for joy because two of his children had gotten the point. Two of his
children had come to realize that generosity is the deepest characteristic of
the holy and because we are made in God's image, our being generous is the
secret to our joy as well.
I thank you for your generosity, which will touch the lives
of so many.
God Bless.
Paul
'Our
Calling' is a statement that was adopted by the Methodist
Conference and sets out what our purpose is as a denomination - "the calling
of the Methodist Church is to respond to the gospel of God's love in Christ and
to live out its discipleship in worship and mission."
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