Seasons of Life

This Sunday, May 16th, we honor high school graduates who are connected with our church. This year, we honor six graduates from Woodville High School, including two exchange students who have spent the year with us. Please note some information about them in this newsletter. I strongly encourage you to be present in worship to praise God for this achievement in their lives and to pray God's blessings on them in the next step in life's journey.
Life is a series of passages. We are born, as Eugene Peterson says, "into a world we did not create, into a life we did not earn" but God graces us with blessings. Along the way, we encounter great joy and great struggle. Sometimes the joys carry us for a long while and sometimes the struggles consume us. Children grow into an awareness of an abstract world, discovering fears and experiencing rejections. They also can learn what it is to love and be loved. Every day, learning of all kinds are taking place. As they pass into young adulthood, they can experience a big, wide, complicated world of victories and defeats, betrayals and acceptance, and hopefully grace along the way. Adulthood is spent working, raising a family perhaps, trying to make a difference, readying oneself for retirement. Older adulthood comes and it's almost as though the life cycle starts over. We begin and often end this life needing the care of others. Life's ultimate passage happens in the form of physical death, when we pass into that unseen life.
Some do not make every season. Sometimes life is cut short. Sometimes we are so consumed with the struggles that it's not death that cuts short life but defeat and fear.
One of my favorite quotes from a saint of the church comes from Iraneus, many centuries ago. "The glory of God is a man fully alive." Are you alive today? Are you really alive? God is looking for people who are full of the Spirit, seeking His grace, searching for opportunities to serve, in good season and bad.
The great Christian hope is that through the various seasons of life, the grace of Jesus Christ is abundant and available for us, not only to survive but to thrive in this life in service as a disciple of Christ.
Join us Sunday as we celebrate the life passage of these high school graduates from this step to the next step. Let's begin praying now that they won't just "make it" in life's journey but that they'll be found by God to be "fully alive" in Him.