Dear Friends, When I first heard about the Covid19 virus, it seemed like one of many news items from halfway around the world – sad, but removed from our daily lives. However, that was January - and by March, everything had changed, and the virus was very much impacting every aspect of our lives. For me, my concerns and worries escalated when our state established shelter-in-place guidelines, because that meant we had to close down our church’s Sunday morning worship services. It was a big step to take for a small church like ours, especially because our only alternative was to move our services online, and not everyone in our congregation has access to the internet. So I was worried that

Dear Friends, This morning I was reading the story of Nicodemus, as it's told in John 3. For those of you who aren't familiar with this story, Nicodemus was a religious man - a Pharisee, actually. The Pharisees were a very strict sect of people who believed strongly that they held the key to pleasing God within their long list of rules to be followed. So by the world's standards, Nicodemus would have been an extremely devout and holy man. However, he had one problem - he wasn't in touch with God. He thought he knew how to handle life, but he didn't. As a result, he was left miserable and in search of an answer to his problems. That's what led him to seek out Jesus. And when he met Jesus

Dear Friends, One of the challenges which every Christian faces is making sure that we love people who are hard to love. We probably all have people in our lives who demand a lot of our energy, take up a lot of our time, and who don’t ever notice the effort we put into doing so. They can feel like “one-way streets”, because we work hard to love and understand them, and it can feel like we get nothing in return. The result is that it’s often a struggle to continue loving and caring for them, or even relating to them. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks because it seems like the longer the Covid19 virus is affecting our daily lives, the more impatient people a