Inspiration

My friend Betty is in charge of hospitality for a church planted by her son-in-law. The church is in a college area and most of the members are recent college graduates.

The first year the pastor offered membership classes for newcomers. Many of them had not been raised in church and needed to learn a lot. At the end of the classes, he decided to hold a pot luck dinner to help the group bond.

He couldn't host all of them at once, so 15 people were invited to his apartment for the first dinner. Fifteen young adults all showed up with a bag of chips. He had to order out pizza to feed them.

Betty knew one of the young women better than the others and that she had been raised in church, so she asked, "Chips, really? Haven't you ever been to a pot luck at your church?"

"Sure," the young woman replied, "but the adults made all of the food."

Ten years or so down the line from that first class, the church still hosts dinners at the end of the membership classes but the church ladies (my friend Betty and other women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s) prepare all the food.

So the question now is....what happens to a millennial church when all of the church ladies retire or pass away?

- Thanks to Kathy Kexel for submitting this.

"Don’t eat till your stomach cries out. Don’t sleep till you can’t stay awake. Don’t open your mouth till it’s the truth opens it."

Medieval spiritual formation

- Frederick Buechner

A golf pro dragged himself into the clubhouse looking as though he'd just escaped a tornado.

"What's wrong?" a woman asked.

"I just lost a game to Houlihan," the pro said.

"What? But Houlihan's the worst player I've ever seen. How could he have beaten you?"

"He tricked me," the pro said. "On the first tee, he asked for a handicap. I told him he could have 30, 40, 50 strokes - any handicap he wanted. He said, 'Just give me two gotchas.'"

"What's a gotcha?" asked the woman.

"That's what I wanted to know," the pro said. "Houlihan said, 'You'll see.' Then, as I was teeing off, just as I had my club poised, he grabbed my shorts and gave me a wedgie and screamed out 'Gotcha!'"

"I can guess what happened," the woman said.

"Sure," the pro said. "That gotcha threw me off, and I missed the ball completely."

"Understandable," the woman said. "But still, that's only one swing. How did he win the game?"

The pro answered, "I couldn't swing well the rest of the game because I was watching out for that second 'gotcha!'"

Westside elder, Jarek Bekesza, preaches about how the olympian life applies to the Christian's life.