 | St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Thursday, October 21, 2021 More news – and another birthday! |
  Happy Birthday, McCayla Brede!You are a great mom and daughter and wife – and just a terrific person all around. Jesusween You might think this is a joke. Sadly, it isn’t. This is a real website. Real bumper sticker. It doesn’t make any sense, but that doesn’t matter. Halloween is, as you know, the eve of All Saints’ Day. Hallow means, holy, or sanctified – like “hallowed be thy name.” And yes, it was also a pre-Christian Celtic festival – to ward off evil spirits, by bonfires, and by hollowing out turnips, carving ugly faces in them, putting a candle inside. Like so many Christian holidays, early believers set their feast days to coincide with holidays already being celebrated – both to be able to blend in in times of persecution, and to mark the time by pointing to a better way of celebration. Evil spirits, evil itself, is not affected by scary pumpkins or turnips, or costumes mocking ghosts and witches – but by the feast of All the Saints – whose lives are lived in Light and Joy and Peace everlasting – That is what defeats evil. Christmas is the same – Jesus was certainly not born on December 25 – there are no records of his birth – but we celebrate it at the time of the turning of the year – the new and everlasting light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot quench. Do you know that we have two counselors working in our building? For the last several years we have allowed two women to use the main office for their counseling practice. Both of them serve Medicaid clients, adopted and foster children, clients who reside in adult residential homes, and other underserved populations. They are poorly compensated for this work, which is why we give them office space for free. It is part of our service to Bolivar and Polk County. Kristi Webb works with children and adolescents, and Sylvia McQueary serves adults. We honor their care for people who have trouble accessing mental health care. More Church family news and prayer requests. Please pray for Dana Rocha who has bronchitis, made more serous because of her other medical conditions. Please also pray for Debra Beal who is in CMH today awaiting surgery for a ruptured appendix. She drove herself all the way to town to the ER in the dark, early this morning in severe pain. The woman is unstoppable. She even apologized for not being in church for the next couple of weeks! Debra also wanted me to let you know that I made a mistake in yesterday’s newsletter. She’s right – I mentioned the distribution dates for SYC as November, rather than December 15-16. We will begin to collect general items for 10-12 year olds next Sunday – and specific requests will be available when Debra is able to return to us. We will ask for specific volunteers for putting bags together and helping on the distribution day early in December.  Coming soon: A new way to make your contributions. Several people have asked about online or automatic giving. The Bank of Missouri, where the church has its account, is setting up a way to do that – It will be easily accessible, with a drop-down menu for giving to specific things other than general offerings – like SYC 2021, the refugee resettlement project, and the the tree-planting project. It will take about two weeks for this option to become available, but we will let you know when it is.The New Website By early next week you should be able to access the new St Alban’s website. It has been a long time coming, mostly because none of us spent as much time as usual at the office while we were closed. We got a good start on it yesterday, and tomorrow Becca will add a great deal of current information to it – and change most of the photos. Already you will find links to our Facebook page, to the Diocesan page and to the page for the National Episcopal Church. We will be easily able to add or subtract sections or wording, so after you get a chance to look it over next week, let Becca know what you’d like to see included that might not be. |
No responses yet