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Sharing and Singing TogetherNo extra link is needed for this one. For this practice, I'll be sharing a practice that my family does on a nightly basis. While praying for each other, as a means to help us listen to one another, keep ourselves focused on each other, and remind ourselves of God's presence with us, we respond to prayers that express needs and prayers that give thanks with a simple sung "Lord have mercy" or a "Thanks be to God" This sharing and singing together is one of the practices that builds faith in our family. Fishy PrayerShushing PrayerStations of the CrossStations of the cross will be hosted by The Episcopal Church of Our Savior on Wednesdays during Lent. Father Steve makes the following invitation: This Lent, you’re invited to a weekly walk with Jesus, to reflect on our Lord’s life being poured out for us. With a printed reflection guide, join the crowd walking (indoors) the Stations of the Cross. Most stations are based on Bible accounts of Jesus’ last day; a few stations are based on Christian tradition. Each station includes a spoken reflection on Jesus' journey, silence, and a prayer. You can stand or sit at each station. Stations will be on Wednesdays, Feb. 21 through March 27 at Noon, at Church of Our Savior, 203 West 4th Street. Soup and conversation follow. Silent prayer time in the church will be at 11:30 am and after Stations until 1:30 pm. If you have questions, please contact Fr. Steve Meysing at 532-0515, ext. 202. To familiarize yourself with the practice and learn a little more about it's history I suggest the following resources.
Labyrinth WalkingLabyrinths have been found in many different different cultures and have been found dating back several thousand years. They are perfect for praying when you can't sit still. In Christian practice, they originated as a means of simulating a pilgrimage for those who couldn't make a longer journey. First Presbyterian Church will be hosting an indoor labyrinth for walking 9-4 daily during Holy Week. If you like the practice or you want to find a reason to spend some time outside on a nice spring day, The Methodist Church in North Platte has a large outdoor labyrinth on the west side of their parking lot that is open to the public. For some more history and thoughts on how to use a labyrinth for prayer please use the following resources as you find them helpful. As you let things go and bring some space into your life in Lent, I hope that you are able to explore these various prayer practices, but I do not hope that you fill your found space with all of them. My prayer for you is that one (two at the most) of these practices is something that you find helpful to your faith journey and that you are able to spend time with it beyond the season of Lent and that you find resurrection through it in the Easter season to come.
Blessings, Pr. Patrick
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If you'd like quick access to First Lutheran's Website on your phone or tablet, follow the instructions below to do so. You can use this method to make a button for any website you visit frequently. 1. Get out your phone, and turn it on. 2. Open the browser on your phone, likely Chrome for Android and Safari for Apple products. This method won't work if you just search for the website from you home screen, you MUST open your browser. 3. Go to www.firstlutherannp.org. It should look something like this. 4. Select the dropdown menu on your phone. This is the three dots in the upper right hand corner on Android and the box with the arrow pointing up at the bottom of the screen on Apple. (Perhaps that makes it an "pushup" menu?) 5. On android, select the option "Add to Home Screen" then "Add" to confirm your choice. On Apple, the menu is formatted differently, but the selections are very similar. You will need to scroll down a bit and select "Add to Home Screen" Then select "Add" to confirm your choice. You may also need to select "Done." You should now have a button on your home screen that will take you directly to First's website when you select it. You can move this button around, group it with others, and delete it just like any other app icon on your phone. I hope this was helpful and makes our website even more useful to you.
I’m someone you might call a jack of all trades. Over the years I’ve developed a lot of skills to help keep my house in working order, my yard and garden growing well, and myself well fed. So, when the question is asked, “Can you do this?” My answer is often, “Sure can!”… Unless it’s, “Nope.” Knowing your skillset and knowing the skillset that is present within an organization is an important step to knowing better who you are and what it is possible to accomplish. If you’ve got the skills present, then the answer, at least as possibilities are concerned is, is an easy, “Yes that is possible.” Then you can go on to discuss, whether it meets passions and purposes, but it is possible. If the skills are not present, then the answer is either, “No we can’t.” or “We’d need to learn how to do that first.” To that end, as we gathered in the large visioning group we came up with the following list of skills that are present within the people of First Lutheran Church: In my time as your pastor, I’ve seen these skills and many others at work. I invite you to add to this list in the comments section below to help fill it out so we have an even better list of skills that are present in our midst.
A church at its very core is people; gathered together, proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, and sharing in Christ’s sacraments. We would do well to remember this in our lives of faith. It can help us hold more tightly to the essentials and less tightly to other things. This is not an easy teaching though, to hold it means that much of what we often associate with and call “church” becomes tools used to facilitate the above gathering, proclaiming, and sharing. This might feel dismissive or like a downgrade to things we hold dear, but I can also say as one who practices numerous disciplines in home upkeep and improvement, the right tool for the job makes all the difference. There are substitutes and there are work arounds but I make sure to keep my basin wrench, snap ring pliers, and self-adjusting wire strippers where they won’t get lost because they make the jobs they are made for so much easier. In thinking about the “tools” we have as a church and what makes our gathering, proclaiming, and sharing of sacraments easier. Our visioning group created the following list of physical assets that we have at First Lutheran. This list is a good start, and as we engage in combining assets with skills and passions to create ministries, there’s a lot that can be done with what is listed, but I invite you to fill out this list even more. What else do we as a church have as physical assets that you would add to this list? I would like to add some of the smaller things that help make ministry happen. We have a lot of tables and small stands around First. I don’t always know where exactly they are, and I do NOT think that we need more, but I know we have them, and when they are needed they can be found and moved and used. These small things often help big ideas and projects become simpler because with a simple visit to a supply closet you can have 80% of the items you need to accomplish a goal.
As you think of our physical assets which of them do you see us using most often? Which do you think we could use more effectively? As we enter a season of updates and improvements it’s important to know which areas we can make the biggest impact on in our life together and for the community we are serving and reaching out to. One thing I know I could use more effectively is our physical location. I face southeast most of the time while I’m in my office because it just has a better view. The office entrance is set back off of 5th street. The sanctuary runs along Sycamore. All of this, within my mind and field of view locates the church building at the sleepy corner of 5th and Sycamore. Doing so, I forget we have one of the busiest streets in North Platte, Willow, on the western edge of our property. I could use that knowledge better when making plans to reach out and help more people know what is happening around First. In addition to using our physical assets more fully, are there assets you see that could be used differently from their original or current purpose? In the last couple of years, we have changed the “children’s choir” room that had not been used in years over to a sewing room that is used weekly if not more by those engaged with our quilting ministry. We’ve cleaned out some storage areas and made them more functional for collecting supplies for Lutheran World Relief projects. We’ve taped some new lines on the old court and made it possible to play pickleball. All of these changes have brought new life into this church, what do you see that could use a home, and make use of our abundant asset of space? Please share your thoughts on any of these questions by commenting below. As we at First Evangelical Lutheran Church seek to more clearly define our place in North Platte, I would suggest the above quote as helpful for moving us to some deeper thinking on the subject. I particularly like this quote because after reminding us that this is not our mission and our work but rather God’s work that we engage in, it presents us with some good news. That news is this: Following God’s call does not require us to drag ourselves out of bed every morning to go and do something that we find burdensome and that we hate every minute of. Following God’s call, rightly done, involves doing something that we enjoy, that indeed, fills us with joy, and in general gives us more life than it takes from us. Then, and this is important, it directs us out into the world where we take that thing that is already life giving to us and we give life to the world through it. The following shows some of the passions that were named at our visioning day. To be clear, following our passions is not always easy. You can probably think of some things that give you joy, but there are times when something doesn’t turn out. There are times when you have to increase your skill level and the learning curve is more challenging than you would prefer. There are those times when you just have to set things down, walk away and come back tomorrow. However, you keep coming back, because that thing you come back to fills you up. My hands have quite the collection of scars, they are often bruised, and sometimes swelled from being overworked. I have made some pretty expensive fire wood in my days, my kids probably shouldn’t listen in when I do plumbing, and the front door of my house (which is beautiful and fits perfectly) nearly needed a new window in it as I was tempted on multiple occasions to put a hammer through it while hanging it. BUT, I continue to engage in wood working, and home improvement, and gaining new skills because it’s a passion of mine, something that has always called to me and goes beyond aches and pains and frustrations to give me and those around me a home to live in and not just a house.
As a church, we have passions as well. As shown above, we listed a number of passions at our visioning day. I’d like to invite you to do two things with this list. First, add to it. What other ministries or tasks do you see people being passionate about around First Lutheran? Second, do some work to condense this list into a few broad categories. For instance, I would add, knitting and crocheting to the list. I would add, Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, and I would say the prayer classes I’ve held recently have been well received. I would add, the harvest dinner, funeral dinners, Lenten meals, and other meals as well. All of these have some passion around them by a good number of people within the church. I’d also then condense some of these categories so they are a little more general. I’d lump the sewing, knitting, and crocheting into the category of “crafting”. I’d put food pantry and meals into “feeding ministries”, things like building upkeep and classic cars into “restoration work”, and many things into the category of “learning.” The purpose of this not to muddy the waters but to make it a little clearer what drives are at work behind the passions. In the end, this can help us be a little more flexible and a little more open to things we haven’t done before when it comes to looking at how we can use our passions in meeting the needs of the world. We’ll get to that work soon enough but for now, let us know what passions you see active and what broader categories you see, by dropping a comment below. Knowing what we value can be a helpful thing in charting a course for the future. For instance if you are working on a question like “Where shall I live?”, you’ll answer that question differently depending on what you value. If you value solitude and open spaces, you might pick a place in the country. If you value quick access to services like groceries or the hospital, you might pick a place in town. Golfers might want a house right by the course and someone who values fishing might pay a little more for a place with access to the lake in their backyard. All of this depends on what you value. Below is a listing of the values thought to be at work at First Lutheran. In early April a group of leaders from First Lutheran gathered together to look at our vision, to see what principles are guiding us, and to begin creating a new image that we will work toward fulfilling in the next decade or so of our life together. One of the things we did in this work was make a list of the functional values we see in operation at First. We can sometimes just say "This is what I value." and then act on it, but we often get a more accurate picture of what values are really at play by looking at how we act and what choices we make and through that deducing what our values are. Values that we can see in this way are called functional values. They are the values, known or unknown to us, that we base our decisions on. The more aware we can be of these values, the more consciously we can act on them, and the more consciously we can work to raise up new or aspirational values in the future. Our next task when it comes to visioning is to better define these values and narrow down the list to 3-5 that we see being most helpful in encapsulating who we are and who we want to be in the community of North Platte. You are invited to participate in this work as well. You can do so by reflecting and sharing your thoughts and stories. Some questions that can be helpful are found below:
How do you see these values being lived out in a concrete way by what we do in the church or community? Are there values you are not sure about on this list, what do you need to know about those values before you can say “Yes, that’s a value of our church!”? Are there values you see at work that are not on this list? What actions do you see us taking that makes you believe the value belongs? You can invite conversation with Neal or Heidi C, Betty K-H, Jody H, Keith K, or Pr. Patrick or drop any of us a note or simply comment below as we continue with this important work. Following up on my sermon for Jan 8, 2022. I have gathered the following resources for those who would like to explore a little more deeply who the Magi were who came to Bethlehem following a star. Two things that I did not have time to go into in my sermon that I would like to point you to are the thoughts put forth in the National Catholic Register, regarding Jewish Communities that were spread throughout the ancient world, and the reflection in the Wondrium Article with regards to the "Wise Men" being fools within the Christmas Story. The first helps us see a little better, who might have been looking towards the affairs of Israel and why they might have cared. The second is a take I've not come across before and is worth some thought. Please enjoy the fruits of being snowed in last Tuesday.
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Patrick SipesPastor of First Lutheran Church, North Platte Archives
February 2024
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