Sunday we had a guest trumpet player who was so excellent you never had to worry that he might miss a note. I thought for a moment I was at Carnegie Hall. The sermon was on the Holy Spirit, and they showed a short video where they compared sailing a sailboat --as the wind catches the sails--to us being powered by the Holy Spirit. It is our responsibility to man the tiller and trim the sails. To close the service everyone in the congregation held hands and sang a cappella "God Bless America." In Sunday school we talked about our legacy as human beings and how we take this legacy for granted. We have a material and a spiritual legacy. By material legacy we were referring to all the inventions that have been made throughout history. In other words, each of us benefited immensely the day we were born--we didn't have to reinvent the wheel or any of the many other material achievements we benefit from. Likewise, spiritually we have a great legacy passed on to us. As it would be dumb of us to reject our material legacy (even a hermit could not shake this legacy entirely), it would be dumb of us to reject our spiritual legacy. That God is love, and that he has shown us through Jesus the way, the truth, and the life is a great legacy that is almost insane (and in any case almost impossible) to ignore. We also talked about the grief we feel when a family member dies. We remarked how easy it is for us to accept that all those human beings living in the 1700's are now dead. We feel we have a forgiving God, and our generation somehow will be exempt from the same remote fate. Then, a family member dies, and death suddenly gets personal. No longer is it a remote concept for past generations, but a fact facing each of us in our generation.
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