Dear Brothers and Sisters,

A quick note.

1) Thanks for praying for me as I spoke in Colorado. It went really, really well. Diane and I got a little R & R too—went to the Air Force Academy, hiked in Garden of the Gods, ate lunch and shopped in Manitou Springs and saw The King’s Speech.

2) Thank you for praying for Mary Maude in Haiti—here is the very good news, “Mary Maude DOES NOT have cancer! It is a benign cyst, a really uncommon kind, but benign nonetheless. Praise God!”

3) Ash Wednesday worship is this Wednesday at 6:30. Why do we have an Ash Wednesday service? For the same reason we observe Reformation Day, Advent, Christmas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Easter when none of these observances is explicitly commanded in the Bible. A friend of mine wrote: “Liturgy in general and special days like Ash Wednesday in particular, help us to ‘flesh out’ our experience with God. We are not disembodied spirits; we need physical signs, symbols, tastes and touch to “incarnate” our theology. The liturgical year is nothing more than the Church’s ‘walking through’ the gospel with the Lord. Since it is a plain fact of our humanness that we are rhythmic creatures who must keep coming back to things that are always true, it is especially good for us to do this in the Church. We do it in our natural lives: we marry and take up daily life with spouses year after year, but once a year (on our anniversary) we find that it is a good thing to mark this ever-present fact, not because it is less true on other days, but because we are the sort of creature that is helped and filled with joy when the routines and ever-present fact are set apart, gilded, and held up for our contemplation and celebration . . .”

This weekend in worship, Chad Robison will tell his story and we’ll be studying James 3:9-18

Love,

Ray