Dear Family,

There are some weeks where being a pastor is a blast. Hunger Week was just such a week. Seeing you guys give so freely was beautiful. Ten-thousand, eighty pounds of food donated, over $12,000 for projects in Homosassa and Haiti, and even our children got into the act donating $450 for the Seeds of Hope project in Haiti. Diane Toto of the We Care Food Pantry wrote of Hunger Week, “We want to thank your entire congregation for including us in you hunger week campaign. Through all their hard work, we received 10,080 pounds of food for our hungry neighbors. Many people talk about helping, but few people actually step up to the plate and follow GOD’s teachings. Thank you for inviting me to attend your service on Sunday. When I walked into your church, it had a warm feeling and your members made me feel welcome and part of a family. I found the sermon particularly inspiring and it fed my soul. I almost wanted to cry when you dismissed your congregation and they all streamed out to purchase food. Thank you for caring enough to help.”

• Pastor’s Class started last night with 40 people. If you missed it, there is still time for you to get in on the fun, join us next week at 6:30.

• As SRCS produces more and more graduates, it’s really fun to see how God is using SRCS alumni. “Wesley Tubman was a 2005 Seven Rivers Christian School graduate. After graduation, Wesley was accepted into the Air Force Academy to train to become a fighter pilot. He will graduate from flight school this month and has been assigned the F15. Wesley will be stationed in North Carolina for a year before he deploys.”

• Taryn Harvey and her SRPC women’s group are raising money for a very worthy ministry called Sixty Feet – which works to rescue abandoned Ugandan children. They are holding a cupcake sale tomorrow at Guardian Angel Preschool. Call Taryn at 352-746-4888.

• Had an appetizer at Rocco’s last weekend that blew me away . . . fried salad! They actually fry fresh spinach and with artichokes and cheese it was amazing. I disavow any responsibility for the heart bypass surgery that consuming this delight will necessitate!

• Wonder how to reconcile the love of God and the wrath of God? “Miroslav Volf, a Yale professor from Croatia , used to reject the concept of God's wrath. He thought that the idea of an angry God was barbaric, completely unworthy of a God of love. But then his country experienced a brutal war. People committed terrible atrocities against their neighbors and countrymen. The following reflections, from Volf's book Free of Charge, reveal his new understanding of the necessity of God's wrath: My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”

• Who are you going to invite to Easter worship? Is God putting someone in your path to bring? Have you handed an invitation to anyone in your neighborhood or workplace? Are you bringing your peeps?

• Last weekend’s experience of healing prayer during the Lord’s Supper was the SRPC highlight of 2011 for me. It was powerful. Now someone else in our church family needs our help in her physical restoration. Charlene Williams is a single mom, just 46, with three children, the youngest of which is her son Kris, a senior at SRCS. Charlene needs a kidney transplant. If you are willing to be tested to be a kidney donor or simply want more information please call Charlene at 352-489-9945 or 352-427-0543. If being a donor isn’t possible for you will you pray that a donor would be found and Charlene would be on her way to physical healing soon.

• Two more weekends of three services. On May 1, we will return to one Sunday Service at 10:00!

• This weekend is Palm Sunday (and we’ll have cookies after Saturday worship and doughnuts between services on Sunday – which has nothing to do with Holy Week but always boosts attendance and morale significantly!) On April 21, we’ll have a Maundy Thursday communion service at 6:30 pm, on Saturday, April 23, we’ll have an Easter Egg Hunt at 11:00 am and then Easter weekend worship Saturday night and Sunday. Can’t wait to celebrate the passion and resurrection of our Savior with you and with our community.

Love,

Ray