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Today, my mom is having the family do an exercise together that we participated in at the first IRSM Destination Retreat. I invite you to join with us today as well.
It is also a great segue as we near the month of December since the blog theme for that month will be Hope and Love.
Have one person read Psalm 136 aloud and have everyone else join together to repeat, “His love endures forever.”
We are now going to create our own version of Psalm 136.
Rotating around the circle, have each person express a statement of what God has done in his/her life. After each statement, the group will respond as one voice, “His love endures forever.” Feel free to do this as many times as you would like!
What if we had listed statements of current challenges in our lives? Does that change our response of “His love endures forever?”
Feel free to repeat this activity on your own, extending your own version of Psalm 136.
The answer always remains the same: “His love endures forever.”
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Thanksgiving day is always a special time to spend as a family. A good portion of my family will be able to share in this holiday together tomorrow.
I know that many have not had the same blessing that I have had of a family that supports and loves each other. We are far from perfect. But we strive to share in the loving support that is best found in the context of family.
I give thanks to God for my family—my parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nephew, niece, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. And I give thanks to God for my family in Christ that spans the world.
As Philip Yancey and Henri Nouwen put it…
“Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?)”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?: My Personal Pilgrimage