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Dear disciples of Jesus:

I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart. Psalm: 111,1.

I will give thanks to Growing Lives, Communicating Life and Maintaining Life.

Spiritual growth happens when we are challenged, when we look beyond ourselves, when we open ourselves up to responding to God in new ways to express our gratitude.

That is true in our giving as well. This year pray for your giving. I don’t think God will ask you to sell every- thing. But, perhaps God will ask you to grow by a percentage this year, and not to stop anytime
soon. Perhaps God will show you how you can give something up in your life and discover a way to give that up. Or, perhaps God will show you how to have more faith in tomorrow and not to hold on to so much be- cause of worry.

The church will once again send you a letter inviting you to grow in your giving. I invite you to listen to that letter and see if you can hear the voice of God asking you, so you will answer with a thankful heart.

The words of Jesus in Matthew chapter 6:

“Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are?

The reality though is that many of us do fear. We worry about not having enough. We fear that suddenly we may lose it all. We often say “what if” as we make decisions to spend money or give money away at the church. The truth is that we have been blessed. God is creator. Luther says that means that God provides us with what we need. Therefore, since God created us, we are free to worry a bit less. We can trust that we are more valuable than the birds of the air. We can live like Jesus says, and not worry about tomorrow.

Click Here to download the October 2018 Newsletter.