 |
February 2007 |
|
Congregational Community
Church of Sunnyvale
* 408-739-3285 * conglchurch@earthlink.net
1112 Bernardo Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 *
|
|
|
by Pastor Gen Heywood
|
February, the month of St. Valentine, brings with it thoughts of love. There are many legends about the Saint. My favorite is that he was imprisoned for marrying people who were legally banned from marriage. According to the legend, Father Valentine disobeyed his government by officiating the weddings between any soldier and his beloved before the soldier was sent off to battle. According to the rules of the State, this was forbidden as it was thought a soldier would fight more fiercely if he had no family. It was serious business as the marriage of a soldier was a threat to national security. Father Valentine’s faith held that the love between two people could cross all adversity and even strengthen the soldier to face whatever might be ahead of him.
Remember the melody to “Heart and Soul”? I remember from my childhood many wonderful afternoons playing this while sitting next to a friend. My friend would play the base part while I played the higher notes and then we would switch. Oh, as we grew, we got really fancy with it so that by the time I was in college studying music, I had a jazzed up version that I couldn’t wait to find someone with whom to play.
There is something wonderful about sitting side by side. It can be in romance. (Have you ever noticed that the church pew is a great place to sit with your beloved? You can sit closer than in a movie theater.) Or sitting side by side can be in the love between friends as my friend and I played “Heart and Soul.” Or it can be in the simple shared love of something else as in the love of music that my college mates and I enjoyed.
In the practice of our faith, we are taught to “love one another.” It is not a command to have a feeling. These cannot be forced. It is a command to have an attitude. This attitude is one that seeks to treat everyone with the same love as we want for ourselves. That is to be just.
Just love is tough. My friend Tina and I once went to an ice cream shop in Newton, Massachusetts. Tina walked in first but the clerk asked me, the white young woman, for my order first. Tina was not about to let that pass. This stately, older and much better dressed black woman, who had marched
page 1
with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and had known Malcolm X, sternly confronted the young clerk, ”Excuse me, I was here first and I will not be second even if that white woman is my friend.” Just love was never tougher. I am certain that clerk was forever changed by that moment.
For this St. Valentine’s Day, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is this: treat everyone you meet justly and expect that they will treat you justly as well. Perhaps, just for the day we could sit side by side with everyone, metaphorically speaking, not ahead of another, not behind another, simply side by side with our heart and soul.
Blessings,
Pastor Gen
Just for Fun...
I have never really learned the lyrics to “Heart and Soul” but thought you might be interested in them, just for fun!
Heart and Soul
(words by Frank Loesser, music by Hoagy Carmichael, published 1938)
Heart and soul, I fell in love with you
Heart and soul, the way a fool would do,
madly
Because you held me tight
And stole a kiss in the night
Heart and soul, I begged to be adored
Lost control, and tumbled overboard,
gladly
That magic night we kissed
There in the moon mist
Oh! but your lips were thrilling, much too thrilling
Never before were mine so strangely willing
But now I see, what one embrace can do
Look at me, it's got me loving you
madly
That little kiss you stole
Held all my heart and soul
Lenten Series 2007
Renewable Energy Basics
During the Sundays of Lent, February 25, March 4, 11, 18, and 25, we will have speakers who will inform us about renewable energy as we continue to seek ways to love this beautiful creation that God has given to us.
With the crisis of Global Warming coming upon us, informed choices can be part of the solution.
The subjects will deal with the basics of solar, wind, biofuels, hydrogen, geothermal, ocean, and hydropower.
Look in your worship bulletins for more information.
***
Also, please keep checking
the bulletin board
on Global Warming and Solar Energy
in Shephard Hall -
new articles get posted continuously.
***
And we continue making plans for International Earth Day
which is March 20, 2007.
Keep on the look out for more information.
page 2
EPIPHANY 2007 IN OUR CHURCH
 -
A Beam of Sunlight on the Christ Child
Early in the Morning -
- Time with Children -
And then “three little wise girls”
and many others 
helped to undecorate our sanctuary
on this last day of Christmas.
page 3
Time for Prayer
Please join Pastor Gen
in prayers for our church
every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 - 9:30 a.m.
Come to church and
pray in the sanctuary if you can
or take a few minutes for prayer wherever you are!
--------
Come join
our little choir!
All abilities welcome - just drop in!
Choir practice is
every Thursday night at 7:45 p.m.
and on Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m. before Worship
--------
TREASURER’S REPORT
Message from Bonnie Harvey,
Temporary Treasurer
I am acting church treasurer while Mary Ruth Green teaches yoga in Spokane for three months. This is made possible by the church purchase of a laptop computer and by Mary Ruth's patient instruction in bookkeeping procedures and the Peachtree Financial software package. The job requires a lot of time, but I find it a fun challenge.
I gave the December Financial report to the Finance and Personnel Board and to Church Council this month. The church year-to-date actual income is $18,918.31 over year-to-date actual expense.
Rummage Sale
Fund Raiser
June 16, 2007
We now have a firm date for the rummage sale. Mark it on your calendars for Saturday, June 16th.
Currently I have a first draft of a moderately detailed plan for accomplishing the sale. After I get a chance to refine this plan a little more I will share it with you in its entirety. In the mean time I would like to take the opportunity in this brief article to give you a little insight into the work to be done and the time frame that various things will need to be accomplished in.
Everyone who would like to help with the rummage sale is welcome. There will be multiple opportunities for everyone who wants to share your talents and flex your muscles - and have fun/experience the camaraderie of working together as a Church family.
Just to get all of you thinking about your talents, the two biggest areas (but not the only areas) prior to the sale that I will need your help with are publicity and merchandise. It would be great if several people volunteered to help with the initial work in each area - to do the planning and start figuring out more of the details of how we are going get this done efficiently. As you may well imagine, publicity is very important to the success of our sale. We will need to look at the best ways and the
various media we can use to publicize the rummage sale so lots of people will come to shop. Create and post fliers, update our web site, post on Craig's list and many other things come to mind as inexpensive ways for
publicity. We also need to encourage and remind everyone in our Church as well as friends and relatives to donate items to our sale.
Speaking of donations, dealing with donated items is a really important task. There is sorting and pricing as well as preparing items for sale. While the publicity work probably will need to be done as a steady stream from now until the sale date, the merchandise work will
page 4
be light early one and then pick up the pace as we approach the sale date. The early work, which could be done by a couple of people, involves tasks such as creating a price list, and figuring out/acquiring what we might need to display items properly (e.g. clothes racks to hang up clothes). But the bulk of the merchandise work, which will start a few weeks before the sale, will require lots of people to pitch in.
Two other areas where help will be needed are facilities (available storage, sales floor layout, etc.) and finance (dealing with the money).
Hopefully you also will want to help out on the day of the sale. If we have done a good job on publicity then we should be able to fill the parking lot facing Bernardo with tables and racks of merchandise.
Hopefully we will have so much merchandise that we'll need everyone who can participate to help out on the day of the sale. How can you help? Well, there will be a wide variety of tasks such as setting up for the sale, getting food/beverages to sustain us, selling the goods, cleaning up at the end of the day, dealing with the money, etc.
I am fortunate to know several people with extensive experience putting on rummage sales. So I am/will be drawing on their knowledge to help us have a very successful fund raiser. If you would like to join me on this project please send an e-mail to mmartinyak@yahoo.com or call me at my home number of 408-996-3788.
If you know what you would like to work on, let me know what that is. If not we can figure that out later.
Looking forward to working with you!
Marilyn Martinyak
 COMMUNITY
PRE-SCHOOL NEWS
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!
We begin this year with a dedication to provide quality childcare, nurturing teachers and a safe and enriching childcare program.
We have had the good fortune to have Thu Nguyen return to us in Room 8, and a new teacher, Pamila Samuel, will join the team in Room 9.
Our new fall brochures will be ready to be handed out February 1st. Returning families will be able to register February 12 and those on the wait list will register February 26, 27, 28th. Open enrollment will begin March 1st. We have had many families touring our facility.
We will be having our second parent night on February 15th with speaker Sue Dinwiddie. Her topic will be “Set Limits and Save Your Sanity”. It will be a valuable night for parents and teachers to attend.
I had the opportunity to attend the South Bay Directors Forum held in Los Gatos. I learned how to motivate staff, got some great organizational tips and was able to network with other directors.
Many teachers will be going to the Sunnyvale Child Care Advisory Board to learn about the issues related to children in the city of Sunnyvale. This was a valuable way for the teachers to learn what was going on in the community.
We had Stanley Lee, from the Child Protective Services come and talk to the staff about teachers being mandated reporters of child abuse. He told the staff what constitutes child abuse, and what to look for when one suspects child abuse in a child care situation. He also related what the procedures are initiated after a call has been made to the Child Protective Services.
I want to thank Christel Fliss for coming to Room 5 and Room 7 and reading to the children. If any of the congregation would like to share their many
page 5
talents with our Community Pre-School children, you are certainly welcome.
Thank you for your prayers and support during my son’s hospitalization after a snowboard accident. My son, Steven, has made a full recovery.
Barbara Steinmetz
(Director of Community Pre-School)
__________
WHAT HAPPENS IN HEAVEN
submitted by Ted Carlson through e-mail
This is one of the nicest mails I have seen and is so true:
I dreamed that I went to Heaven and an angel was
showing me around. We walked side-by-side inside a
large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, "This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received." I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.
Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section. The angel then said to me, "This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them." I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.
Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly sitting; doing nothing. "This is the Acknowledgment Section," my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed. "How is it that? There's no work going on here?" I asked. "So sad," the angel sighed. "After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments.
"How does one acknowledge God's blessings?" I asked. "Simple," the angel answered. "Just say, "Thank you, Lord."
"What blessings should they acknowledge?" I asked.
"If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your
back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep you are richer than 75% of this world.
"If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
"And if you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity."
Also ....
"If you woke up this morning with more health than illness you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day.
"If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation you are ahead of 700 million people in the world.
"If you can attend a church meeting without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world.
"If your parents are still alive and still married you are very rare.
"If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, you are unique to all those in doubt and despair."
Ok, what now? How can I start?
If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you as very special and you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.
Have a good day, count your blessings, and if you want, pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.
Attn.: Acknowledge Dept.: Thank You Lord!
"Thank you Lord, for giving me the ability to share this message and for giving me so many wonderful people to share it with."
page 6
THE PILGRIM’S WAY
by Christel Fliss
In September 2006 I made my most memorable journey hiking along the El Camino de Santiago - “the Way of St. James”. This road to Santiago has been declared a World Heritage Site, and in addition to the spiritual significance, it holds other historic values, such as having been the backbone of European cultural unity. The Routes to Compostela started out in Sweden, Poland, the Low Countries, Ireland, England, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey, and all branches merged in France to continue on a single road to Galicia.
A pilgrim undertakes this journey to search and find not only himself but also others at each stage, each inn, and at each “monjolie” (a small mound of stones marking each intersection) always following the sign of the “shell” until arriving at the Altar of the Apostle St. James in the Cathedral of Santiago di Compostela.
Though the motives of those making the “route of forgiveness” can be spiritual or not, all say it is a trip that stays with you for life - and I agree.
And here is the story of the St. James Trail.
In the year 813 in the land known as “world’s end” in Galicia, a hermit named Paio discovered the tomb of St. James the Elder (Jesus’ cousin St. John the Divine). According to the legends, James (Santiago in Spanish) the Apostle came to Spain on a long ministry to evangelize the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. Later he was beheaded in Palestine and his body was placed by two of his disciples in a stone boat which miraculously set sail with no pilot, reaching the Galician coast. After journeying up the Ulla River, the boat marooned at Padron. After many vicissitudes, the body was buried on Mt. Libredon. Little by little was forgotten until a bright star shone guiding the hermit to the field where the saint was buried. With this legend, it is no wonder the Apostle’s tomb has become a sacred goal of the Christian religion since its discovery.
A magnet as strong as Rome and Jerusalem at times, Compostela attracted pilgrims from all over the world who wanted to follow the route of the stars of the Milky Way to secure forgiveness for their sins. The Emperor Charlemagne is considered by popular tradition to be the inaugurator of the Jacobean Way (the Way of St. James) and the name “pilgrimage” was received from the poet Dante.
To this day it is still Europe’s most legendary pilgrimage.
page 7
 Looking Ahead
- Please mark your calendars!
A NOTE FROM
OUR CONFERENCE MINISTER
REVEREND DR. MARY SUSAN GAST
Northern California Nevada Conference
United Church of Christ
Forum 4 - "Faithful Witness
for Justice and Peace"
February 10, 2007, 10:00 - 4:00
at First Congregational UCC, San Jose
As with other Forums, we will be joined by representatives from the national setting of the UCC - this time by members of our denomination's Justice & Witness Ministries - Rev. Ervin Milton, Director of the Franklinton Center; Rev. Carlos Correa Bernier, Minister for Environmental Justice; and Ms. Ann Hanson, Minister for Children, Families, and Human Sexuality Advocacy.
We will also be honored to have present with us Bishop Elizer Pascua, General Secretary of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines.
The agenda for the day will include worship, greetings from our Conference Minister, Mary Susan Gast, and other Conference leaders, presentations by Bishop Pascua and members of the Justice & Witness Ministries Team and a variety of conversation groups on topics of concern to us all.
The purpose of each Forum is to focus on a particular area of mission for local churches. The information, concerns, and questions that arise from the conversations and presentations will be reviewed by the Conference Board of Directors so that they can shape the future content and staffing of the ministries of the Conference.
Conversation Groups for Forum 4 will include: A Christian Response to Issues of War & Peace; Earth Stewards Presentation on Global Warming; Human Rights Violations in the Philippines; A Christian Response to Immigration; Safe Church Practices; Refugee Resettlement; A new JWM-produced documentary "Troubled Waters"; How Mission Education can enhance your congregation using CWS/CROP as an ecumenical model; Jubilee and Economic Justice; and State-level advocacy.
As in past Forums, a delicious lunch will be served and child care will be provided.
As always, advance registration is appreciated and is particularly necessary if you need childcare or overnight accommodations. Register with Susan Walsh at First Congregational UCC, San Jose (408/377-7121).
For further information and updates, check out the NCNC website at www.ncncucc.org.
ANNUAL MEETING
Sunday, June 3, 2007
following Worship Service.
Please prayerfully consider if you would like to serve on one of our boards.
If you would like to be part of the nominating committee, please talk to our moderator Doug.
Communicator Deadline
Deadline for the March 2007 Communicator is February 21, 2007. We accept submissions of texts, photos & graphics at our office, 1112 S. Bernardo Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 or via e-mail (conglchurch@earthlink.net).
Office hours: Wednesdays 1:00 - 4:30 pm
Thursdays & Fridays 9:30 am - 2:30 pm
page 8
|
