Newsletter here
Love is in bloom in the Williams Family in 2024. We have one son getting married in May, another son getting married in October and a granddaughter getting married in June. Whew! This is the month of valentine’s hearts and chocolate candies and everything else love related. Yet it’s so much more than a greeting card holiday month.
Love isn’t just about the starry-eyed love stories of the Hallmark Channel. Love is easy and yet it’s also very hard. Love can also be saying good-bye to the person you sat across the kitchen table from for however many years. Love can be accepting that your now grown children have different choices and preferences than what you have.
Our newest daughter-in-waiting, as I call her, is from a different continent and a completely different culture than what we have ever known. They wear different types of wedding dresses, and they don’t send out invitations, they just show up. There are zero noodles in their diet, which is completely foreign to this pasta loving person. They even have different church music than we do, yet we still worship the same God.
When we say, “God so loved the world”, what world are you thinking of? Does it consist of many different countries, cultures, and traditions? Or is your “world” just what is beyond your front door? The world encompasses 7 continents filled with people who are different from us. It reminds me of a term that I heard by a now-retired UMC pastor who called the UMC church GLOCAL. That’s because it is both global and local = GLOCAL. I like that term because I think that it better expresses God’s love for us all. God loves us in ways that are both intimate (local) and broad (global). How are you seeing God’s love expressed Glocally today?
Blessings,
Pastor Bev Williams
Mears & Shelby UMC
Leave a Reply