Double Header

Today was a double-header Sunday, with one sermon at my home church and another at the local megachurch. Both were terrific. I never dreamed I'd enjoy being in church for six hours straight on Sunday mornings, but there it is.

My home pastor has started a series on "Getting Healthy for the Holidays." He's not referring to physical health (although there are plenty of jokes and asides about the caloric perils of the holiday season) but to spiritual health. His theme today was on your appetite - as in, what you feed yourself. "Do not hunger after the junk food of the world," he said, and I agree whole-heartedly. Southern Man has long held some disdain for practically everything on television and hardly ever turns on the tube when he's alone; his TV serves mainly as a monitor for the VCR and DVD and LaserDisc players. Yeah, Laserdisc; Southern Man may be a techie but he often bets on the wrong format. Witness the several boxes of Beta tapes in his garage that he can no longer play. Which, sadly, includes the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a good bit of Star Trek: Voyager. And, sadly, his VHS copies of the rest of Voyager and pretty much all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were made on a deeply maladjucted VCR and those tapes are also mostly unplayable. Yes, Southern Man is a Trekkie. DVD sets of any season of any of the above will be welcome as Christmas and birthday presents for the forseeable future. Don't even ask his opinon on whether you should go with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD; he's bound to guess the wrong one. Anyway (Southern Man tends to drift a bit, as his students will attest) the sermon was pretty good - good enough that I took fairly copious sermon notes, which is not my usual custom. Of course it's nice when the pastor says things that you not only agree with but are also largely doing. Not that not watching TV is that big a deal.

The noon service at the local megachurch was also good - the best of the handful of sermons I've heard from their senior pastor, anyway. His new series is based on the word diakoneo (Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Greek), (Strong's Greek Dictionary), which means, roughly, to serve or minister. The pastor's admittedly loose interpretation is "to love from the center of who you are." I won't bore you with the details of the sermon but suffice it to say that I am, for the first time, beginning to really hear God's voice through this particular church.

Six months ago, Southern Man was going to church just to survive. Now the worst of the storms of separation and divorce have passed and he's going to church to learn and grow. There are no doubt plenty of troubles still ahead but I am feeling stronger and more able to deal with them with every passing day. Lord, I pray that you would continue to give me the wisdom and the strength to accept Your love and to give my love to others; to ask Your forgivness and to freely and honestly forgive; and to seek Your will as I walk the path You have set before me. Amen.