Good Friday & Easter Sunday

Hi everyone,
Please note that for Good Friday we'll be doing Imago Dei Kids at the 6:30pm service only. Nursery like usual in the gym, and then a mixed age group in the gym of 2-3 year olds in one room and 4 years and up (2nd grade max) in the big room. We'll be doing special art projects that night, a storytelling of Jesus death and burial, and some live worship. See you there! If you are a cleared Imago Dei Kids volunteer let us know if you can help that night as we'll need some extra hands. karen@imagodeicommunity.com

EASTER SUNDAY we'll run all 3 services like normal for Nursery and Early Childhood. Elementary kids will be IN THE SERVICE, so no class for those kiddos. Have fun celebrating the risen Christ together in the service.

This is usually our biggest Sunday of the year. Please spread the word to all parents to come to the 9am or 12pm services!!!!!!!! We just don't have enough room at the 10:30am for everyone. If you are a cleared volunteer and can help an extra service on Easter we could sure use you!! Please let us know if you are available to help.

Thanks everyone! Happy Easter - He has risen indeed.

Marriage homework

Recently Rick preached a sermon that God seems to be using to change marriages. In it Rick expounds on Paul's exhortations concerning marriage in Corinthians chapter 7. He encourages us to consider how Christ gave His life for the church- His bride- as the model for a God ordained 'mutually giving' marriage. Give a listen here.

Below are the questions he poses for all of us to answer together with our spouses. My husband and I did these and it was really good, hard, and is still now helping us address some things that needed to be. As I oversee children and families here it is hard not to notice when there is a season to focus on marriages more than others. This is one. Perhaps due to financial hardships and loss of jobs or hours is causing more marital tension? I think that is a big part. But the overall inquiries our pastoral staff is getting regarding marriage counseling and being in community with other believers to walk them through marriage issues is very high right now. Which is good. It's time to start talking about what many of us aren't talking about - what's going on at home, and with our spouse. For the sake of our kids. For the sake of our marriage, which God desires very much.

So for those of you that missed this sermon, or have not yet done the homework questions :), I encourage you to dive into with your spouse. Grace to us all as we reveal our hearts to one another.

1. What are your desires? (touch, time, talk, serving, gifts, etc)
2. How have you seen sex as a you owe me rather than an I owe you? (repent)
3. What would change in our marriage look like? Dreaming together.
4. How can you best serve each other to avoid sexual temptation?

Angry Conversations with God

I am reading this book by Susan Isaacs called Angry Conversations with God. I think I like it. It's reminding me of a hundred conversations I've had with people over the years and several I've found myself having with God from time to time. Mostly it feels to me to be a walking this woman through the seasons of her life that were the most painful for her in her relationship with God and others. Through it it's helping her to see where she has blamed God for it all and how it ends up - He wasn't the one to blame at all.

I have not finished it yet, but am getting close. I'm not sure the book has captured the whole gospel of who God really is. But it doesn't seem that was her aim. Rather, I think it will be one I will recommend to those that have gotten spun out in faith and in church and are finding themselves bitter and distant from God and other Christ followers. Most of the story is about her struggle in singleness as well. It provides a way back to what is real and true. A gentle journey through the pain to the eye to eye, ear to ear time with God.

Susan Isaac is speaking at Imago Dei on April 3rd at Evangel campus. I'm thinking I will go to hear her. She's a professional actor and comedian and funny as snot. So I'm hoping for some humor but also to see how well she can articulate transformation and community of faith. Come and check it out.

It's almost Easter

• It's coming on Easter and I'm hanging in waiting.
• There is a kind of grief that proceeds this holy day, if you let it in. And I admit I don't like it.
• Not one bit do I like this pre-Spring anticipation. I want to. But I absolutely do not.
• This is the season before the beauty comes. Where we prepare and wait and wonder. But new life has not sprung yet. The dark is still here even as the blades of grass and the buds on the trees hint at what is to come. It's raining. It's cold. There will be a death to consider before there is life.
  
• If I am really trying to enter into the amazing miraculous holiness of the season - I enter into this thing called Lent.
• I do not like Lent. Yes, mark it down and chat amongst yourselves. Karen Rogers is NOT a fan.
• Even the mention of it at staff meetings or the sudden planning of an Ash Wednesday service puts me on defense. It's coming. That amazing day that is the pinnacle of the year and of my faith. But it will not come without a cost.
• This season represents more pain than I care to write about. Simply put, a lot of loss has happened during these months in my life. The same months, for many years, have been very painful. So that just complicates Lent i think for me.
• And yet, I feel compelled, even inspired to engage in what it must have been like to walk with Jesus during those final days and hours to the cross.
• How is this Lent season for you I wonder? Because for me it is downright awful. I cry more during this season. Am kind of depressed. Usually confused wondering what is wrong with me and why I'm so hormonal.
  
• One year I watched Mel Gibson's The Passion. 2wice. I bawled my face off both times, the first time my head in my lap in the theater crying uncontrollably after the lights had come on. The images still ring in my view when I allow them in.
• I see His face a lot lately. Glimpses just. Maybe even a sound or a thought. Is He hurting? He looks sad. I feel His heart beating in mine, and I shiver. Can I hear Him breathing?
• It's coming. And I cannot stop it. He's going to die all over again and I've been asked to relive it. Year after year.
• Sacred. Holy. He was alone. He did something I will never understand. It hurts to think about it. To let it in is painful. A revisiting of my own hurts. But moreover - an entering into His.
• I can NOT understand why Christ would die for us, for me. It is utterly God to do such a thing so absurd and sacrificial.

And then there is Easter. It is coming and I feel it's warmth on my skin even as I am grieving. To consider Easter answers the begging question I have of why in the world He did what He did. It is so obvious and so wonderful. A few years ago I came across this passage. I'm sure I'd read it many times before but that year, something came over me intensely as I realized for the first time what it was to really take in the resurrection, after the grief of His death.

Now it is my every year passage that brings me to His feet in both His death, and His forever life that beats in me. May it bring a similar joy to you in the depth of your being as you read. There is something indescribable and humbling about being truly known, and hearing His voice. I am doing my best to enter into this Lenten grief right now. But I am very much awaiting Easter morning when I hear Him call my name and remember what He has done and how very much alive He is, and we all are.

Peace to you as you do your own dealings with Lent.

John 20:10-18 (New International Version)

Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene

¹⁰Then the disciples went back to their homes, ¹¹but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb ¹²and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

¹³They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"

"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." ¹⁴At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

¹⁵"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?"
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

¹⁶Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).

¹⁷Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

¹⁸Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.

Imago Dei Kids workday

We had our first workday in years this Saturday! Thankful to be able to get into the gym on a weekend. Almost 40 teachers and leaders came out to clean out all the storage cases we roll in each week and to rethink the way our set up looks. Will get some pictures up of the new look soon, but here's some fun shots of some leaders working on it all.

Thanks everyone who helped get it all done. It looked great today and had a nice open and displaying of what we are about feel. Now can someone explain why we had a sudden explosion of kids coming today? I think we had our largest kids day ever!

Spread the word - please attend the 9am!!!!! We're opening a new room at the 12pm too so there is plenty of room at either of those services. The 10:30am is FULL.

A little redemption goes a long way

Today – a woman visited our church with her husband and child, someone I have history with and used to be a part of our community. I haven't seen her in years. The last time I saw her she was angry and hurting and asked me for counsel. My son was just an infant at the time and we sat in my living room while he slept. I read the bible to her and spoke what I felt to be what God would say to her. She did not like it and was not happy and told me she would divorce her husband anyway and that she disagreed with everything I'd read. She seemed very disappointed the bible didn't say what she hoped it would. She left miserable and angry.

Several months later she got in touch with me to say that she’d had a change of heart due to what we talked about and was moving to Korea to be with her husband who had left. This was shocking and amazing news! I wondered more what had happened but she was unable to find time to hook up before she left. I didn't hear from her for a couple years. I’ve always wondered what happened.

This past year she got in touch saying that they (she and her husband) were in Oregon now and had a baby and were doing well!!! I still hadn't gotten the whole story but was thrilled to hear the news and told her I'd love to see her someday.

Today...they came to Imago Dei and found my husband and I just to share with us what God had done in their marriage. Wouldn't you know it that my husband and another elder had met with him a few times back in those hard days they had too? I never even knew that (or maybe I've forgotten). So there we were in the hallway at the end of the day him telling my husband his story and she telling me hers. It was all I could do not to cry, to shed some tears of joy on their behalf.

She stood there looking like a completely different woman than the one who sat on my couch all those years ago. She was holding her adorable baby girl and sharing with me what God had done in her heart. Something only He can do. Nothing I could ever take any credit for. Just Him pursuing her, and she going home to be with her husband. And they - just so thankful for their daughter, and for each other, and for Christ.

This frames my week. I am ready. Bring it on - a little redemption goes a long way doesn't it? This is what we live for.