I was blessed this morning when I read the blogsite article from our youngest daughter, Melissa.
She serves as a children’s minister with Wellspring Christian Church south of Nashville, TN and is being used by the Lord there in wonderful ways.
Of course, I am proud of her. But I’m more pleased with how God is shaping her for even better service and blessings in the years ahead.
Here is her article that brims with vibrancy and humility. It also contains a powerful observation about gender-specific sin struggles that I had not heard before but which is ABSOLUTELY true.
I’m sure that you’ll connect with her experiences on some points. As we all become more careful to imitate Christ, the world will be better off and the Gospel will become more influential in our corners of the world.
The complete article is below, but I also encourage you to click on this link in order to post a comment on her blog.
Football and the Brady Bunch
Yesterday my friend/preacher/boss taught out of James on “Taming the Tongue.”
Ouch.
It’s a priority for me to attend service and I also want my volunteers to make it a priority. It’s pretty basic, to feed we need fed. It was a particularly busy morning so I thought that I could skip just this once. I checked and chatted with most of my teachers and then decided to go into service.
I heard the sermon title and thought, “Maaaan.” It occurred to me yesterday that as men struggle with things like lust, pornography etc., women struggle with gossip, slander etc. It is tricky though, because we don’t have accountability computer software that pops up when we are gossiping.
We can wrap up our gossip with the label of “trying to solve a problem,” “seeking advice” or maybe even a “prayer request.”
I am sooo guilty. I was talking with a very close friend of mine during the sermon (yeah, I know…shame on me) about how my friend and I tend to “try and solve problems” a lot.
Here is where I pretend to know football…
It is my understanding that when someone does something wrong in the game, the ref can throw a penalty flag. This lets everyone know a penalty has been committed and they can’t do that again.
I told my friend that she and I needed a flag for our conversations. Every time we were sharing things not applying to each other or saying something that is “next door to not nice,” then we need to say “FLAG!”
Try this today and see how many penalty flags you throw…
Of course, Andy (Hudleson) didn’t leave us all sitting in a puddle of guilt. He supplied us with some ways to help tame our tongue. One of the things he mentioned was to encourage people.
That seems easy enough but in reality, we do make that weird. Just this morning, I was complimenting someone online. He already had a few compliments and I thought to myself, “Yeah, Andy tells us to encourage and we all go Brady Bunch”.
Don’t judge me.
Have you sincerely encouraged anyone lately? If you haven’t, try encouraging your children’s church volunteers. They work so hard for your kids and, yes, I am biased.
Melissa Cook, children’s minister
Wellspring Christian Church
