Piloting Faith: One of my favorite stories...

A Word for the Day...
One Sunday during my sermon I read one of my favorite stories to the congregation. It is a book written by Robert Munsch called “Love You Forever.” It tells of a mother who watches her son grow up through the years, longing to express the incredible love that all good parents feel for their children.
The mother holds her infant in the rocking chair and sings:
I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living,
My baby you’ll be.
As the boy grows into a toddler and then a teenager and then finally an adult, she continues to hold him and rock him back and forth, back and forth singing her song of love.
I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living,
My baby you’ll be.
Finally, when she is old and tired, she calls her son to come visit her. She tries to sing her lullaby to him, but she is too weak to finish it. Hearing her struggle, her son goes to her, picks her up into his lap, and sings it back to her:
I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living,
My Mommy you’ll be.
I don’t think there is anything as sacred as having someone who loves us deeply sing/pray for us – it unleashes a Spirit that speaks possibility into our lives like nothing else.
Jesus’ prayer was finally that we would know God as surely as we know ourselves. But the good news is that regardless, God will always be singing the lullaby of unconditional love in the earnest hope that we one day sing it back.
- Rev. Cameron Trimble, author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight

Prayer for the Week
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.
- Reinhold Niebuhr