From Jesus to 25,000 denominations worldwide…how did that happen, and how can they all be that different?

We’ll be exploring those questions over lunch at the student center in room 303 from 12-12:50 each Thursday.  We’ll provide fresh pizza made from ingredients from local farms and made by Stone Hearth in Cambridge.  You…bring questions and conversation.

Excerpt from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller, pgs 164

“Let’s write letters,” bob said.  The kids wondered what their dad was suggesting.  “I’m serious,” Bob said.  “Let’s write all the leaders in the world and ask if they want to come over for a sleepover, and if we can interview them and ask what they hope in.”  The kids got very excited.  maria smiled and loved the idea.  Bob told the kids that if any of the world leaders said yes to the interview, even if they couldn’t come for a sleepover, he’d fly them to that country and they could video tape Lindsey asking what they hope in.”

Bob didn’t expect anybody to write back, so he brought home more than a thousand pieces of stationary and the kids researched world leaders and came up with more than twelve hundred address for heads of stat and assistants.  For a while they heard nothing, and Bob confessed he was relived, but then a single letter came in, and a few days after, another.  Both of them franting an interview.  And then another letter, until in all twenty-nine world leaders contacted the Goffs instructing them on how to make arrangements to interview their countries leader.  Bob shrugged his shoulders when he told us the story.

We read all kinds of bad stories, but too often we find ourselves caught up in them as well.  What does it mean to write a better story with our life?

We gave away copies of this book last spring…let me know if you would like a copy.

thawkins@mit.edu

“O dear God, thank You. You are such a good God to us, a kind and gentle… and accommodating God. And we thank You, O sweet, sweet Lord of hosts… for the… smorgasbord… You have so aptly lain at our table this day… and each day… by day. Day by day by day. O dear Lord, three things we pray. To love Thee more dearly. To see Thee more clearly. To follow Thee more nearly… day by day… by day. Amen. Amen.”

And the second is the prayer of Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrel’s character in Talladega Nights) where he begins the prayer thanking the sweet baby Jesus for Domino’s and Taco Bell.

Although, saying grace at meals might seem a bit awkward at times, or even out of date, it speaks something that we know in our soul but we don’t often speak, “If I don’t eat.  It don’t live.”

Losing our compulsion to saying grace, is to distance ourselves from our mortality.

We are aware of issues of poverty and malnutrition in the world, and no doubt it alerts some instinct in our evolutionary past and causes us to pay attention.  We want to respond to it, maybe even fix it, maybe even become an activist or entrepreneur or developer to find solutions to eliminate death by hunger.

But, maybe it also awakens us to a hunger of the soul.

Giving thanks or saying grace is an acknowledgment that if I don’t eat, I don’t live.

And, I want to live.  I want others to live.  And I want to know what living is for.

Jesus connects the soul and food with regularity, calling Himself “the bread of life”, “living water” and coming beside those who “hunger and thirst” in the soul, and calling us to come alongside those who “hunger and thirst” physically.

“Saying Grace” in its simplest form means acknowledging that I want to live, and I want to know if there is meaning in this moment of living beyond fuel for my cells that keep my physically moving.

And so, grace becomes a confessional prayer, “God, something in my soul knows there is more to this meal than surviving.  Help me know what it means to live.”