It is very hard some days for me to switch off completely from the life and ministry we share at Cedar Park. Today is my Sabbath; I should be baking pumpkin muffins, or winterizing my garden today, but I have thoughts,prayers, feelings about yesterday’s worship  rumbling around my being this morning, some of which I want To share in this blog space before I get going with the muffin tin!

Gospel, “Good News” about the life of God lived among the people of God, as we learned, felt and experienced yesterday through the Gospels according to Janice, and Sam and Ernie, are not just stories of jubilation,triumph, joy. In fact such good news all the time would be bland and unbelievable.cropped-cropped-Guatemalan-fabric-17e0ok4.jpg  More and more we are discovering that Gospel is woven with yarn spun from pain, sadness,hard work, anguish  and heartache. It is when such weft is threaded through the warp of goodness, God’s grace shown through compassion, kindness, prayer, presence…..that a tangled skein of trouble becomes a whole cloth, woven in almost equal measure with the colours of sadness AND joy, brokenness AND wholeness, grief AND consolation.

It takes great courage and trust for our worship life together to reflect the wholeness of this Gospel cloth, and I am profoundly grateful to yesterday’s Gospellers for having that courage to trust. To all of us who found our own stories of redemption echoed in Janice’s art or in “Dawn’s story,” we experience worship together that was real, and whole, and for me at least ,worship that has lingered long in my soul. Which is good. Gospel.