05
Feb
10

Learning To Sit Still

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: ,

So I am 34, and I am just starting to really learn to sit still. (Insert my parents’ applause here). The pace of life in our culture is lightning fast, don’t you think? I have been meditating and reading L.B. Cowman’s Streams in the Desert. For today, she was talking about how fast paced life was (mind you she wrote this in like the 1920’s). I wonder what she would think about the pace of life now!! Anyway, we are so busy at being busy that we forget to make room in our lives for the things that matter. Namely God, our family, and even oursleves. I drank the Kool-Aid. I’m busy by nature-a workaholic even. But I am learning about disciplines, especially spiritual disciplines. I used to think that disciplines were about checking a box. Read bible. Check! Pray. Check! But John Ortberg once said that the disciplines are about creating space, making room. So for me, learning to sit still is a discipline I am learning so that I am able to make space in my life for God. I am beginning to use the same for my family and even myself. Creating space in our lives allows us to connect with God, others, and ourselves.

29
Jan
10

What’s the purpose?

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: ,

I have been spending some time working through A Book of Hours from the writings and reflections of Thomas Merton. During this week, I have become more and more certain of one thing, and Merton helped strengthen this belief. Purpose has been a buzz word, especially with churches attempting to reach out those who are not in church. Book shave been published to tell us what our purpose is. The topic of purpose isn’t a new thing. So here it is. You want purpose? You got it!

We were created in the image of God. God is Love. Therefore, the purpose of our existence is to embody love. True, committed love for EVERYONE! True, committed love struggles to love through every circumstance. True, committed love does not rest in the presence of injustice and discrimination. True, committed love holds to love everyone at all times & in all ways.

Now that’s purpose.

22
Jan
10

Health Kits for Haiti – If you are in these areas

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

There is a dire need for health kits in Haiti. Local churches are asked to prepare as many of the kits as they can. Bill Carr, Disaster Recovery Coordinator for the Memphis Conference of the United Methodist Church, says congregations should have their kits prepared by January 31 and ready to transport to the designated district pickup points on Monday, February 1. All kits will then be boxed by Volunteer in Mission teams and shipped together to Sager-Brown, our UMCOR depot in Louisiana.

The following pickup points have been selected for the Memphis Conference:

Germantown UMC, 2331 S. Germantown Rd., Germantown, TN

Brownsville District office, 1489 E. Main St., Brownsville, TN

Union City First UMC – 420 E. Main, Union City, TN

Aldersgate UMC – 1050 N. Parkway, Jackson, TN

Mayfield First UMC – 214 S. 8th St., Mayfield, KY

Paris District office – 810 E. Wood St., Paris, TN

Please let district offices know how many health kits your church has prepared.  If you have any questions, call Bill Carr at 270-816-4824 or 270-556-5221.

If you would prefer to donate money to the Haiti Emergency through the United methodist Church, please donate through your local United Methodist church to UMCOR Advance#418325.  Checks can be put in the church’s offering plate. 100% of gifts made to the Advance will go to help the people of Haiti.

Each health kit must contain the following items in EXACTLY the amounts requested. If the amounts are not exact, they will not fit in plastic bag and may not adhere to the strict rules governing entry into a foreign country.

Health Kit Assembly Instructions
(Health Kit Items Value: $12 per kit) – depending on where you shop!
Place these items inside a sealed one-gallon plastic bag.

1 hand towel (15″ x 25″ up to 17″ x 27″, No kitchen towels)

1 washcloth

1 comb (large and sturdy, not pocket-sized)

1 nail file or fingernail clippers (no emery boards or toenail clippers)

1 bath-size bar of soap (3 oz. and up)

1 toothbrush (single brushes only in original wrapper, No child-size brushes)

6 adhesive plastic strip sterile bandages

$1.00 to purchase toothpaste
(NOTE: UMCOR Sager Brown is now purchasing toothpaste in bulk to be added to health kits before shipping to ensure that the product does not expire before they are sent.)

Important Kit Assembly Information
All items included in kits must be NEW items.

All emergency kits are carefully planned to make them usable in the greatest number of situations. Since strict rules often govern product entry into international countries, it is important that kits contain only the requested items-nothing more.

Do NOT include any personal notes, money or additional materials in the kits. These things must be painstakingly removed and will delay the shipment.

22
Jan
10

Story from the Notre Dame orphanage…

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags:

21
Jan
10

Twitter Relief Effort

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags:

So by now we “think” we know what’s going on in Haiti. I personally have been boycotting regular programming opting for Anderson Cooper’s coverage on the situation in Haiti. I have been motivated to give, and help organize with a couple of local efforts…blah! blah! blah! All the while, there has been someone who has not been as reserved. One person has caught my eye, and my attention on Twitter. If you are on Twitter, I encourage you to follow @ShaunKing. For the past week or so, Shaun’s passion for the hurting and desolate in Haiti has transformed into an all out relief effort that has stemmed from him and other like him. He has conducted Twitter-thons (version of a telethon on Twitter) to raise money to pay for computer equipment to aid relief workers and has secured a team of Neurosurgeons to go and help in Haiti (not to mention raising the money to fly them to Haiti)…Really folks, this has been incredible. He is not alone..I know this. he probably doesn’t want any attention on himself, but more likely on the dying folks in Haiti. In many ways this reminds me of Nehemiah’s role. What broke his heart inspired a vision, and that vision bears a movement. It’s a movement that has directed aid organizations and news outlets to locations within Haiti to get to places of dire need such as Notre dame Orphanage.

Am I writing this as an admirer of one’s tireless effort to help save lives? That is definitely worthy of writing about. But perhaps we should look at this and say to ourselves, “Just because I am thousands of miles away, just because I can’t hop a flight right now, doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything about this situation.” In today’s age, it only takes a keyboard or a text message to be intimately involved in a movement such as this. Some of us can do more; some can’t. Either way…just do something!

18
Jan
10

It’s still….Haiti

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags:

Even a after a week, the sometimes hopeful and sometimes horrific news of Haiti dominates us. Leno or Conan…no one really cares. Tent cities, rubble, lack of supplies, medicine, treatment…as I type people are still trapped underneath tons of rubble. Hope is waning, but the need is soaring. I have been encouraged at the intiative and response of many individuals, groups, and churches. But on the day that we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I wonder. I wonder what he would say about the poverty that remains in our nation, but the poverty that remains world wide. The United States makes up 1% of the world’s population but possesses 40% of the world’s resources. Disaster amplifies poverty. The quake was a disaster. Disaster continues in the aftermath as people die form secondary infections…But let’s remember one thing. Poverty is a disaster for all of humanity. Even after the quake aftermath is cleared up the disaster of poverty will remain. so what then? Aid organizations leave and we take the training wheels off of the bike that has no wheels…then what?

15
Jan
10

Health Kits For Haiti!!

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

This is a note from our pastor @HeartsongChurch, Steve Stone, about what you can do in response to help with the catastrophe in Haiti:

I’ll share more on this subject this Sunday, but I wanted to let you know now of ways we Jesus followers can help our sisters and brothers that are suffering from the devastation in Haiti. The United Methodist Church is encouraging churches to help gather health kits for Haiti. Most of the info below is for the staff of the churches to know, but what I want to bring to your attention are few ways you can jump in and help:

  • Financially support the entire relief effort by indicating “Haiti” or “UMCOR” on your check and place it in the offering for the next 2 Sundays. 100% of the donations will be sent to the Memphis Conference of the relief effort in Haiti.
  • Financially support the effort to make health kits by indicating “Health Kits” on your check and place it in the offering for the next 2 Sundays. These donations will be used to purchase the items for the health kits.
  • Choose to purchase the items listed below for the actual health kits and bring the completed kits to Heartsong for the next 2 Sundays.
  • Serve on a team that will  (a) go purchase the supplies from funds donated (b) serve on a team that will put the health kits together (c) or serve on a team that will deliver Heartsong’s health kits to Germantown UMC on February 1.

We will have an example of the health kit this Sunday in both celebrations, as well as a kiosk will be set up in the Hearth Room for more information and to sign up to serve in some way.

All of us together, partnered with other churches world wide, will make a difference, for Christ’s sake.

07
Jan
10

Where your treasure is…

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: love
Tags:

So last night we began a series with our youth based upon SYM’s Backward$ series.  The series is about our quest for stuff which inevitable affects the people that we were intended to be.  We were created in God’s image, and among them any things that God is, he is generous.  God has given so much to all of us.  Since we were created in his image, we were created to be generous and giving.  One of the scriptures was from Ecclesiastes 5:10 which says, Those who love money will NEVER have enough.  How absurd to think that wealth bring true happiness. When I was studying this, it hit me that you never get enough of the things you love.  When your first fall in love, you want so much to be with you rsignificant other.  You can’t get enough.  You learn every little mannerism and interest so that you can know that person better.  If you love clothes, you can never have enough clothes.  Your closet always has room for nice, new, stylish clothes.  If you love money, you can never get enough.  Bernie Madoff ringing a bell?  But you don’t have to be rich to love money.  Poor folks can love money, too.  Either way, we were created to love God, not money.  So if we truly love God we should always seek to be with the one we love.  We were created so that we can never get enough of God.  When we truly love God, everything that we do revolves around him, his word, and his will.

05
Jan
10

A Dare

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: God, faith and kingdom

“Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Put me to the test! Malachi  3:10

This verse has been stuck with me for a day or two for a couple of reasons.  First, Malachi, a prophet, delivers the words from God saying, “Try it!  Put me to the test!” I think often that people, including myself, often confuse putting God to the test with daring God to do something.  To test means to measure one’s ability.  God says, “OK, do that.  Do what I have asked you to do.  Go out on faith take a measure of my ability.”  But we often dare God to do things.  To dare means to challenge one to perform an act of courage.  I think that there is a dramatic difference here, but perhaps it will come out better over he next few days as I wrestle with it more.

Second, I began to ask myself, “Is a tithe just applicable to money?”  Looking forward into 2010, I want to be a better steward than I was last year.  But what does that mean?  A tithe, 10%, of everything you have been given…To tithe my time, means to give 876 hours to God this year.  Some may say that biblically a tithe is about money, but in an age where our time IS money…what are we to give of that?  Can I give up nearly 17 hours per week…as an offering to God?  What can I do with 17 hours a week?  Maybe things that are more important than tithing…

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things.           Matt. 23:23

03
Jan
10

Cool and Fun

By jathanielcavitt Leave a Comment
Categories: Experience, church and fun

So today at our church celebrations, our emphais was on Remebering our Future.  The message reflected upon Revelation 2, where the scripture talks aobut the church had forgotten its first love.  Well, we revisited our first love, and that first love is having fun for Christ’s sake.  Well, I must confess that sometimes I want to be cool.  But being cool is not always attractive, and cool is a very relative term.  It hit me that for me, cool is not fun but fun is cool.  People are attracted to fun.  We clamor for fun.  When you are having fun, it makes people curious…”What is it that they have that makes them want to have fun?  I want to have fun, too!  I want to be fun, too!”

Being cool is not fun, but being fun is cool.

« Previous Entries

Tweets

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.