West Main

It is back to school time. This is always a double edged sword. We all have a love/hate relationship with it. We hate that it means early bedtimes and early rising again. We hate the idea of homework. But we love seeing friends, and establishing routines again. After a busy summer, school seems like a welcome relief.   :)

As we enter this new season, we begin to switch into new approaches of ministry at church as well. We let go of summer and enter the fall.

One thing we REALLY want to expand this year is our continued community outreach into Oak Grove School. Last year we started a relationship that we pray will grow. The strike threw it off, but we are getting it back on track. We need to build a team!

We will be going into the school and running their “RAM STORE” for two hours every Wednesday afternoon. It is SO fun! Last year we got to know the students, teachers and staff and really started building good relationships. But, just a few of us cannot sustain this alone. We NEED your help. Would you consider helping out?

The more volunteers we have, the better! We can spread out the assignments and you can volunteer as little or as much as you desire. See Brian or Terry with any questions.

We pray this year we can truly reach deeper into our neighborhood school and shine the light of Jesus! Please join us.

– Pannell

Next Wednesday, September 10^th the Youth Group will have our BACK TO SCHOOL PARTY! We will eat dinner, play games and discuss our upcoming studies! Don’t miss this fun night and bring your friends!

THE  LONELIEST  THING  WE  WILL  EVER  EXPERIENCE

I am a bit of a Star Trek fan. Not a rabid fan, mind you, but more of a Sci-Fi fan in general. Recently, I caught a rerun of the Star Trek movie, The Undiscovered Country. There is one scene in particular that caught my attention. One of the characters, Spock, has a life after death experience for which his friend, Dr. McCoy, asks him, “Can’t you tell me what it felt like?” Spock responds, “It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference.” “You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?” McCoy retorts incredulously.

Spock is correct. How do you discuss an experience that you share with no one else?   I often read, “Death is the loneliest thing we will ever experience.” We literally die alone. No one will share our death with us. The theologian, Paul Tillich soberly writes:

“We remain alone in the anticipation of our death. No communication with others can remove this loneliness, as no presence of others in the actual hour of our dying can hide the fact that it is our death, and our death alone, that we die. In the hour of death we are cut off from the whole universe and everything in it. We are deprived of all things . . . in which we forgot our being alone. Who can stand this loneliness?”

“We are deprived of all things,” means, in other words, in the hour of our death we can no longer hide or escape from being a solitary individual who is alone with our thoughts. In the moment of death there are no more distractions the universe may offer up to keep our minds preoccupied.   No one else will be inside our own consciousness distracting us or speaking to us. In the hour of death there is just “me, myself, and I.”

So I wonder if the fear of death is more about the fear of being alone than the fear of dying? Perhaps one motivation behind those who seek out séances is for the purpose of alleviating the fear of being alone in death—the loneliest thing we will ever experience. We long to converse with someone who knows life after death, and so maybe not feel so alone in our final hour.

When Jesus rises from the dead and appears to two women at his tomb, he says, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10). Jesus also tells us, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Scripture further teaches us that Jesus died and rose again so that “he might destroy him who holds the power of death - that is, the devil - and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Death closes in on us and appears to isolate us as solitary individuals. Yet the Scriptures seek to reassure us, not falsely comfort us, that we while we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil [even the evil of feeling abandoned], for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).

We have many promises, witnesses, testimonies, and assurances from the Word of God that despite the solitary experience of our deaths, we are never truly alone. Yet, only alone by faith can you choose to believe what is revealed. Otherwise, a lack of faith is a lonely affair. If only we would seek out God in our loneliness, could we then not die lonely.

– Terry