Archive for June, 2009
Father’s Day Celebrates Relationships
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Father’s Day at our house began with cards at breakfast and continued with a St. Peter’s tradition. All the men of the church, young and old, fathers, grandfathers and sons, join together at the front singing several hymns.
After church our celebration continued with lunch at our favorite Mexican restaurant, gifts and then a movie. Back at home we gathered around the television to look at pictures from our family vacation in France. We ate a late dinner together, enjoying our day immensely.
My Father’s Day gift for Tom this year was taking all of our videos – collected since the day our 19 year old daughter was born – and having them transferred to DVDs. There are precious memories on all of those videos and having them on DVD will allow us to watch them more easily now that VCRs are all but a thing of the past.
The last thing I heard last night as I drifted off to sleep was my daughter laughing uproariously. She had already begun watching one of the DVDs from when she was four and taking dance lessons for the first time. What a joyful noise that was to send me off to dreamland!
Growing up, Father’s Day was always a little tense. My parents divorced when I was quite young and my father and I spent very little time together. As an adult, though, my dad and I have become quite close. Because of the many years when we did not have much of a relationship, we are both very intentional about talking, listening and spending as much time together as possible given that we live in Houston and he lives in San Diego.
Perhaps it is this perspective that makes watching Tom with our daughter, Mary Beth, such a pleasure for me. Personality wise, they are very much alike and sometimes when they are at odds, I have to leave them to workout their differences without my involvement. Other times they are all the entertainment I need – they feed off of each other and are like a comedy routine. How grateful I am to have them both!
Thinking about them and thinking about Dad, I picked up my devotional book this morning to find that the reading from the Bible was from 2 Samuel 1:1; 17-24. It is all about David’s grief over the death of his friend, Jonathan, and his enemy, Samuel.
Reading these words, I began reflecting about relationships. As I spent time working in my yard this morning, my thoughts drifted and I realized that for me and probably for you, the most important “things” in my life are relationships. Not just with my family but with my friends and, most importantly, with God. Relationship with my husband and daughter form the pattern of my home life. My relationship with other family members and friends give my life additional substance and texture. But my relationship with God gives my life structure. My faith is the foundation of everything I do and all that I am.
So when we celebrate Father’s Day, we are lifting up those men in our lives that have been important to each of us. We thank them for the care, love and support they have each provided. But today, the day after Father’s Day, I am thanking God. For each and every relationship in my life and for the knowledge and certainty that each of those relationships is God’s gift to me!
Showers of Blessings!
Leah Taylor
Summer Begins with Annual Conference
Monday, June 1st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
It is always a joy to gather for Annual Conference and this year was no different. For those of you who were not there, I hope you had a chance to watch some of it on the Conference website www.txcumc.org. There was streaming video, some of which is now saved to the website. Are we high tech or what!
If you were in The Woodlands, I pray that you are taking your experiences back home to your local churches and districts. Each of us was there not just for ourselves but to work for the future of the entire United Methodist Church. Several of you requested the text of my Lay Leader Address so I am putting it at the end of this short entry. Feel free to use it in anyway that you feel called to do so.
Over the next few weeks, I will be a world traveler! Tomorrow I leave with my husband, Tom, and our daughter, Mary Beth, to spend six days in the Loire Valley of France. This trip has been a dream of mine since I began taking French in eighth grade. We will tour chateaus, poke around the countryside and eat our fill.
Then we’ll send Mary Beth back to Houston while Tom and I go on to Turkey for an interfaith trip. Needless to say we are excited and I’ll have lots to share when I get home. But, you won’t be hearing from me for the next three weeks. So, enjoy your summer and know that you will be in my thoughts and prayers.
Showers of blessings,
Leah Taylor
Lay Leader Address
Annual Conference 2009
Good afternoon. It is a privilege to be here with you today. In the last year, my work as Conference Lay Leader has taken me from Katy to Cote d’Ivoire; from Sugarland to Sacramento; from Galveston to Dallas; from Ore City to Jacksonville, Florida. Everywhere I’ve gone, my faith has been strengthened, stretched and challenged; whether it was putting my faith to work in our own Annual Conference participating in Hurricane Ike clean-up or sharing my faith with love half a world away as I held Ivorian children giving them measles vaccines and bed nets. In Dallas, with delegates from all over the South Central Jurisdiction, I prayed for guidance and discernment in helping elect Bishops who will lead us into the future. And in Sacramento and Jacksonville, I spent time with laity from all over the country, listening to their stories, their hopes and dreams, hearing how their faith is challenging them to grow our church.
Now we have the opportunity to worship, the time to celebrate our achievements, the chance to discover a way forward and the obligation to discuss and vote on legislation sent to all Annual Conferences from the 2008 General Conference. We’ll do all of this in the splendor of the Woodlands United Methodist Church. And all of these things are important, but…
At the 2008 General Conference, a piece of legislation was adopted that has already been implemented. It is not up for a vote here or in any other Annual Conference because it did not amend our Constitution. It has made its way into my home church and many of yours without much fanfare, without spirited discussion and without any controversy. But if we all really live into this legislation, it could turn the United Methodist Church around. After the 2008 General Conference, new members are now asked to support the United Methodist Church with “their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their service … and their witness.” As we receive new members we each renew our vows to uphold the church with our prayers, presence, gifts, service and our witness.
When you and I joined the church, we all vowed to uphold it by our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. That seemed reasonable to me. Prayer has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. And prayer is something we can do anywhere, all alone or in community with others.
Presence, well we’ve all got that one down pat. I mean, here we are, in church and it’s not even Sunday! You are all clearly the folks who are more than Sunday Christians. Church must be an important part of your lives and you have gifted our Conference and your local church with your presence not just in worship but in bible studies, working on committees and being a part of the daily life of your church.
Gifts might be a little more problematic. For many churches, stewardship season is a tough time of year. Just talking about money is hard, but we all know that to make the ministry of our churches happen those discussions have to happen.
Service is my favorite aspect of our membership vows. I love rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty. One of the most moving experiences I have had in the last several years was being part of a work team in Vidor after Hurricane Rita. When we arrived at the home where we would spend the rest of the week, the client was hanging sheetrock – from his wheelchair! Learning how to hang sheetrock along side the person who would live in the house when it was finished was an amazingly spiritual, and joyous, experience!
So why the addition of the word “witness” to our membership vows? After lots of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that prayers, presence, gifts and service are just too easy. It’s possible to do all them without building a real connection with another person. We can do all of them with out uttering the words “Jesus Christ” out loud.
But witness, well that is a concept that requires some action and interaction. In the dictionary “witness,” in our context, is defined as “one who publicly affirms their religious faith” or “the act of testifying to one’s religious beliefs.” You might say that the new witness portion of our membership vow is where the rubber of our faith meets the road!
A couple of weeks ago, the passage from Acts 8: 28-40, was part of the lectionary. I love this story. An angel of the Lord has sent Philip on the desert road. On the way he meets an Ethiopian eunuch who has been in Jerusalem to worship. Scripture says, “on his way home (he) was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah, the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:
“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
And as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
So he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why shouldn’t I be baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.
By adding the word “witness” to our membership vows, we acknowledge that for each of us, at some time, there will be a chariot carrying a eunuch. Each of our chariots will look different and each of our eunuchs will, too. Yours might not be reading the book of Isaiah when God calls you to his chariot. You might be called upon to witness to someone who has had an unpleasant experience with organized religion. But when we became Christians, God did not tell us that it would be an easy road. In fact, Jesus’ life, death and resurrection teach us that it will be a difficult path. And yet, when the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, the eunuch didn’t spend anytime looking for him. He went on his way rejoicing. In Eugene Peterson’s The Message, it says, “But he didn’t mind. He had what he’d come for and went on down the road as happy as he could be.” He had come for grace and salvation – the good news of Jesus Christ.
In years past, I have worked as a volunteer in our church office. We allow young people who have been ordered by a court to do community service to work those hours at the church. It was just a few weeks before Easter that year and we had a young man working off a lot of community service hours. He was helping me run off the inserts for the church bulletin. This was not the first week we had worked together – in fact he had been there for three or four weeks. I never asked him why he was required to do community service and he never shared the information. But as we were feeding paper into the copy machine, he said to me, “Easter sure seems like a really big deal around here.” I was stunned. It took me a minute to respond that, yes, it is a big deal. Here he was, a boy who grew up outside of the church but in my community, working in my church without any idea why Easter is important. He told me that at his house Easter was all about bunnies, but he didn’t know that there was a religious connection. I felt as if I had met an Ethiopian eunuch and he was riding on a Hewlett Packer Copier turned into a chariot! I don’t remember his name and I can’t remember exactly what I said to him, but I do remember praying a silent prayer asking for the right words to share the good news with this young man. Although the words I spoke came from my heart, I’m pretty sure that they were placed in my mouth by the Holy Spirit. I don’t know if that experience changed his life, but I do know it changed mine.
So as we are all here together in this beautiful place, as we discuss and vote on legislation that has the potential to divide us and place us on different sides of issues, let us all join together in our witness. Let us come together with our witness of love and rejoicing. As Philip brought the gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch lead by the angel of the Lord, let us come together, lead by the Holy Spirit, to look for those people outside of our church who are waiting for Christ… just waiting for us to bring Christ to them. Waiting, so that they, too, can go down the road as happy as can be. Our testimony, our public affirmation of our faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, our witness, inside these walls and in the world will not only reach those who are seeking God’s grace for the first time, but will also build and strengthen each of us and our connection. Our connection to each other and to the United Methodist Church. Thank you.