We are in the depth of winter. What a snowfall we have seen in Michigan this week! Whether we make a moan or a squeal over the presence of a lot of snow, the beauty pics (don’t be afraid to zoom in to see the small wonders of snowfall) and the quote above on a calm blue background is a quiet reminder to us today. 

Know that in our faith lives that all should not be asleep. Sleep is not the same as taking rest. Faith is not meant to hibernate in times of deep cold and freeze in our lives. We do need to take healthy time to renew and restore when our very souls cry out in pain. 

But when your personal spring returns – enter out with joy to serve our God of all things! Serve with joy and thankfulness in your heart for God makes all things new in us continually. There is a time for all things, including self renewal. Learn to recognize your need for it gently and be gentle to yourself for you are God’s temple. 

Try using that new awareness of the spirit within you to serve others in your days. For in what more precious way can we be present for others then when we show them whose we are. 

No matter where you are, your personal spring’s a-comin’. Companion with God and wait with expectancy!

~Shauna Weil

A devotion provided by the Devotion Ministry of Goodrich UMC

I have been called to an attitude of prayer more often recently for others and sometimes on behalf of my crazy often lost feeling ways. Prayer helps. 

No matter how you approach prayer – prayer is the intercession needed for God to hear things from us about that which he already knows. He does know, for he is an omniscient God. Look up the word – the omni words can get me confused too sometimes, and yet I continue to try to use them correctly. 

I secretly think that God likes to know that we know of these needs as well and we carry them on our hearts as we do our days. You don’t have to know how to pray, you don’t have to be a prayer warrior to pray- though if you begin you might just become one. We are surrounded by many prayer warriors. I have at least one in my family – my Great Aunt Dorothy, approaching 100 years of age and diminutive in stature, is still is a powerful source of prayer in our world.  

I am surrounded by mentors in our congregation who are prayer warriors and stand boldly in the power of prayer believing wholeheartedly in the need for it and the richness and healing it provides in our lives. 

One of my mentors, a very humble man, told me he prays 3 hours a day, this was no boast as I have known, watched and loved this man since I was a child. (He only boasts when he plays cards, and he is forgiven that!) This man has helped make a path for me in my life and hearing that about his daily acts of service at last year’s Pass It On Prayer Service just humbled me even more. This is a place for growth in my life and it is happening in me. 

When my brother Stephen was dying from a cancerous brain tumor, even the doctors at U of M told us to never underestimate the power of prayer. Even though Steph died, I do not believe our myriad of prayers went unanswered. Prayer can be powerful in community as well, I know that as my dear faith journey partner, Barb Maki, and I prayed together by phone the other day. Afterwards, we spoke of how nice it was to pray together and how powerful it is. 

Approach prayer in your own way and time. Don’t worry about how you pray or how others pray. You are talking to a benevolent God here, folks. My prayers are sometimes more like conversations with God. Sometimes I am actually in an attitude of prayer. If you still worry or wonder how to begin, talk to pastor Joel about it, or one of our many prayer warriors. I’m going to offer some names up and I’m sure if you reach out in some way or sometime, they will be reaching back toward you without hesitation. Prayer warriors are all sorts of people so choose someone who seems most comfortable to you: Mark Schulte, Wanda Kohan, Roger Gill, Barb Maki, Val Brinker, Janet Elledge or Darrell Wilson for a start. 

However you feel about prayer, listen to Katie Nichole pray for you today as she sings In Jesus Name (God of Possible). She has a powerful voice so if you want to be more peaceful,  turn your volume down. If you want waves of prayer to just wash over you, be bold, go no holds barred! Your choice. 

We always have a choice, I remember that in a Holy way because that freedom to choose comes from God, the one who created us. Simply unimaginable beauty!

So choose in your time which may down the road be discovered to have been in God’s time. (Meaning, he knew where you were or are and he will wait for you.) Good stuff, eh?

~Shauna Weil

Pastor Joel shared the scripture passage below with us yesterday. I can’t get it out of my head and I continue to think about it. 

James 4:14-17

14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. 17 If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

Pastor Joel is right. It is rather a harsh verse in some ways. I am no theologian, but I believe I have found some light amidst this seemingly unyielding upbraiding. Verse 15 speaks to me of the basics for us as Christians. If we say, “If it is the Lord’s will” then we might assume that we have taken the Lord as our God. Verse 17 seems to then say that if we know the good we ought to do we should get to doing it. But the wording is stark and harsh. If we honestly know God, we will be guided by the Holy Spirit within us and we will hopefully serve with joy and do the good that we know and are called to do. 

But look at one big assumption that I have made. That we know our God. Perhaps the first thing we should do is make sure we do know God and affirm that we have invited Him into our lives in a wonderfully present and vibrant way first. 

Yes, that sounds like a good first step. Remember gently, that at any given point we all may be at different places in our journey – some of us moving ahead, some of us a little off track, some of us totally disoriented and heading in the absolutely wrong direction and some of us just stuck. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll all change places on the journey over time. 

These things happen to us. God knows – just find God first. He loves you and is a Father of infinite grace and infinite ideas for how each of us with our unique gifts, can best serve him by doing the good thing and making the good choice.  

What is first always? Find God first. Then go out into the world for him. Lauren Daigle taught me this lesson in her beautiful but powerful song First. She sings of a precious and worshipful way to come before God that has, over the years of listening to it, reoriented my approach. See if it speaks to your heart today. First things first, right?

~Shauna Weil

Sun after rain; joy after pain…

Above are words of hope that can be uplifting for us today. I heard them while driving a few days ago and jotted them down later to share with you. But they don’t hold the whole story for us. 

At the end of this devotion will be the song that they came from for you to listen to.  The lyrics of that melody fed me that day, may they help you in some way as well. 

I look for joy, I seek it out constantly. This is not just happiness I want to find but I want to see and know the deep intrinsic joy that only our God provides to us. I want to witness it in others; I want to see someone know that joy for the first time because I have experienced that joy and I want others to know it as well! It is not something to just hold to yourself. It is meant to be shared!

The scripture verse below is a good one to take a look at the joy God provides for us if we but believe. 

Romans 15:13

13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy

and peace as you trust in him, so that you

may overflow with hope by the power of the

Holy Spirit.

Overflow, in this case, it is a wonderful joyous thing. It is not an overflowing pot on the stove that leaves a discouraging mess or an overflowing river that leaves destruction. No. For just look at all the good that comes with this trust and its overflow – hope, joy and the power of the Holy Spirit that resides right here within us every day all the way. How comforting!

So let’s be uplifted today and go forth with the knowledge that if we but believe, we can change what our own lives might hold and be today and in the days ahead but also the lives of others whom we know and those whom we may meet. Let the power of the Holy Spirit loose in you and pray for it to work outwardly in you. Do you like that juxtaposition of ‘out’wardly and the next word ‘in’? Me too! Even seeming opposites can bring all things to beauty if the one who reigns is present with us. God is just that good!

Choose joy…share love….endlessly. 

~Shauna Weil

A devotion provided by the Devotion Ministry of Goodrich UMC 

Take a breath, settle and read the words of a Persian poet from the 13th century who was interested in connecting with God. 

“There’s a morning when presence

comes over your soul. You sing like a 

rooster in your earth-colored shape. 

Your heart hears and, no longer frantic, 

begins to dance.”

     ~Rumi

I read that the other day not for the first time. It is beautiful to me. “Presence comes over your soul.” That simply arrested me with its loveliness. Certainly you have had a moment when you have felt the presence of God in your life. God in his protectiveness comes over your soul to not only protect it but to fill it full and hold it still for a pregnant moment, perhaps to allow something to change or evolve in us. It is the sweetest of the sweet and the finest of the fine. 

Let me add this piece of beautiful peace from Psalm 42:8:

By day the Lord directs our ways,

At night His song is with me —

A prayer to the God of my life. 

Both of these pieces of writing, though theologically coming from different streams of thought, convey an idea of creating a space to acknowledge God. As we interweave our lives with all the busyness of our days and our interactions with others, we need to be mindful to practice the art of holding space. Hold space for that intrinsic part of ourselves that sustains us – our relationship with God. If we hold that space, there is room for all the beauty that is expressed in the two pieces of writing above, to nurture each of us and give us courage and calm to know deeply within us that God is enough. In fact, more than enough. Create the space in your life and let God work within you and with you. 

If you forget why you might need to do that, reread the two pieces of writing above coming to us from centuries ago. It was important then and nothing has changed in all those intervening years. But if there is one constant in those intervening years, which is intentionally kind of a funny way to reference centuries, it is the presence of our God. I think we would do well to hold space in our lives for that! Who knows what could happen…I wouldn’t want to be the one to underestimate this indescribable unquantifiable God of ours. 

~Shauna Weil

I got up to see the sunrise this morning. Most of you know I am not a morning person, but I got out of bed to confirm for myself what I know to be true in my heart. I needed to see that sun creep up over the edge of the horizon and lift the world into being with its glorious light for yet another day. God does that for us. 

Whether the dawn is absolutely radiant or altogether muted, God faithfully has set the world in motion with sunrise as a part of each day. I like to believe in doing this he sets an example each morning of His faithfulness to His people so that we will respond just as faithfully. How? By solely yielding, giving up or ceasing to resist, what God requires if we love Him, taught to us by His Son, Jesus Christ – that we give our love wholeheartedly to our neighbor. 

I don’t often see the sunrise but I have faith that each day it rises. We walk not by sight but by faith, as I was recently reminded by one of my friends. After hearing Pastor Joel’s sermon Sunday, I add that we should also walk in love. He spoke that it was important for us to love and gather in unity not only with those who are like us, that is easy to do, isn’t it? God’s ask of us is to walk in unity and love with those who are like us as well as those who are not like us. 

That’s always the rub when you have chosen this walk – it is not easy. The choices we are called to make are usually truly simple but can be incredibly difficult to actually choose to live out. 

We fear so much in life when God already knows our fears and is ready to love us. We are reluctant to show who we stand for when God has shown us faithfully through the ages that He stands for us, for we are His children. Our eyes will not open to see what is plainly before us to be seen; when God has been speaking His truths into our hearts from the moment of our first breath in His creation. Our ears cannot hear truth though reverberations round us ring, the music of the spheres. God’s true tones. 

Today, as every day, the sunrise lovingly lifted us into a new day of God’s making. Let us to rise to meet it with the worthiness and grace that God bestows upon each one of us no matter whether others believe we deserve it or not. It is not for others to decide. If they do, they trespass on God’s Holy Ground. Pay them no mind. Look only to God and let His love lift you to a new dawn and a new day and a new life. 

I, for one, yearn to meet God often as he calls me to service in this world. Do you yearn to do the same? Come, let all of us in love add to our own stories each day and share them with the world. You realize, we are known as God’s people by the stories we tell. You will see yourself in the stories of others and you will hear stories that seem new and unlike us. We will be quick to call them unfamiliar and not ours, yet they will continually ring uncomfortably true deep somewhere in us, as if the heart knows what the mind cannot. 

Pray for discernment on why that may be so. Release the things that inhibit you and let yourself be lifted up with love to share. God does not ask anything of us that He has not already shown us. 

~Shauna Weil

A devotion provided by the Devotion Ministry of Goodrich UMC 

Did you listen to that welcome to our new year by that energetic group of kids? Wow! Music is wonderful for our souls and we were just joyfully ushered anew into 2022. 

The kids told us to let the old memories go and start gathering new ones. That is a special message to us as Christians. Read the scripture passage below from Corinthinans. 

2 Corinthians 5:17

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

There are more references in the Bible to focusing on the new and not looking back but forward. Remember that whole pillar of salt moment in the Old Testament? Someone looked back. Uh-oh! 

I know from being a pianist that if I make a mistake while playing, and believe me it happens, my bigger mistake is to keep looking back to where I made the mistake or to continue thinking about the mistake I made while I try to continue playing. As an accompanist you never want to stop playing! Looking back at my mistakes is a sure way to make many more bigger mistakes or to just become overwhelmed and stop completely. This is something any musician has to learn to overcome. (Now, we have to stop in practice to practice, so, all you budding musicians out there, I’m on to you!) In fact, as musicians we are always supposed to be looking ahead of where we actually are in the music. We are trained to focus on what is ahead. 

So to me, that scripture does not mean forget all your memories or things you have done! I believe it is saying remember but don’t become consumed so much by the past that you forget that each day and each moment ahead of us is an opportunity to become a new creation in Jesus Christ.

Welcome to this new year and this new moment! Any moment is a good moment to renew and refresh your relationship with God. He is there, ready to make you a new person in Him. Shake off that old, as those young ones did so joyously in the video, and let’s look forward to walking into a new light this year full of opportunities to learn, to grow, to be kind, to share, to be thoughtful, to love, to forgive, to pray, to be compassionate, to commit and on and on. These aren’t resolutions I’m talking, we all know how long they last, but rather it’s transfigurations I’m talking about. There is only one Master of that! God. 

I think I’m a bit silly in this New Year because all I can think of right now as an invitation to step out anew is in the Wizard of Oz. That old Wicked Witch of the West scared and caused fear to come upon me so when I was a small child. Now I know, we don’t need to be afraid! You are joyously permitted to dance your way into the new. 

Watch the short clip below and Happy New Year to you all! 

~Shauna Weil

Yosemite Reflections

Could I walk or climb that path if it was the way? Could I do that?! 

False alarm. We rounded a bend and our eyes saw clearly we were not required to climb that ever upward road of large rocks. No, the trail took us in a different direction, just as hard in its own way. 

The second picture above shows a mere few feet of it that I thought spoke volumes about choosing our paths in life. Lo ok at all those stones making the path. What if we were required to make our way through those stones as if each step and each stone were necessary for us to make it through? I would have stopped right there. I did. This is the walk of life. But how do we walk it? And what is required of us?

Let’s reference Micah. He is usually considered a minor prophet in the Bible, but had gained enough respect and esteem in his life’s work among the poor and disenfranchised to be referenced by later prophets and teachers in their own work. Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah and prophesied of the birth of a Messiah who would claim Micah’s folk as a part of His people. In Micah, we are told clearly what the Lord would require of us. Hear the word:

Micah 6:8

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly[a] with your God.

I had been praying my way along this hike when I came to this pathway of fitted stones. It spoke to me as if it were my life journey. How am I to choose my path through the confusion of our world? Every stone looks as good as the next. But is it? No, every path is not as good as the next and Micah voices how the Lord wants us to make our way through life – justly, with kindness and by walking humbly. (By walking humbly, we might just be able to hear God speak to us instead of hearing only our very own voices or someone else’s who is intent on misdirecting us. Just one of the advantages of walking humbly.)

Whoa! Not an easy ask, is it? How well do we do that without asking God to come along side us on our journey? I prayed at those stones before taking a step forward for the gift they were to me and I thanked God for showing once again just how much I need Him every day and in every way. 

There is a song that came to mind as I considered what God requires of me. It’s in our chancel choir files at church and I always loved to make this music with everyone involved in choir whether they be singers, musicians, directors, sound techs etc. – I love coming closer to God working in harmony with people from our various walks of life. For me, music serves to ground God’s message deep inside me – much like hiking does. 

Our church does have an anthem that matches this verse exactly and I love that one too! But, today, I recall the piece we did more than once called “Order My Steps”. It is written as a gospel song and I love to let my fingers reach deep to get a ‘good hunk of Jesus’ as my niece, the Reverend Megan Walther is known to say , when I play the accompaniment. She usually says that about communion bread – she wants everyone to get a good hunk of Jesus. I laughed out loud when I first heard her say it and briefly wondered if my mother, Barbara Crumm, Megan’s grandmother would think it improper in some way. (She didn’t.) I have come to love Megan’s way of referencing this sacred part of communion and find it eminently appropriate. 

We need Jesus so much every day all the way. How else are we going to find the path and be sustained along our journey if we don’t always have with us “a good hunk of Jesus”? Listen to the YouTube recording of our version of the piece “Order My Steps”. I knew I needed help before I continued my journey in Yosemite. I am sure you are no different. 

I wish I had a recording of Goodrich UMC singing this. Why? Because the GUMC choir takes risks and we have always sung, played, and directed with our hearts wide open. I only hold that rendition in my soul. But prepare your heart anyway and listen to Mark Hayes’ arrangement and God’s message will come alive for you, too. That song and it’s message remains alive in me, so I will hike on and we will meet again. May God’s blessings be upon your journey, my friends. 

~Shauna Weil