Beautiful Legacy

We spent the Sunday before Christmas worshipping with and serving our friends at a Church plant in my hometown. We knew very little about what my Nana had signed us up for, but we are always willing to go along for her crazy rides ...
A friend of hers is starting a Church is downtown Augusta serving mainly inner-city people who are either homeless or living in extreme poverty.  My family and I cooked enough food for 200 people, but ended up hanging out with and serving only 75. We had a blast singing praise and hearing how God is working in this City. 
I know very little about the Church or the Pastor, which is not my usual situation.  I am the one to make theological stances part of common introductions ;) however, it was refreshing to just sit back and fellowship in the same building where the first Southern Baptist Convention was held.
As we sat in this small service of less fortunate, the irony of the situation was comical.  A small Church of homeless people were "making due" with a cold and crumbling building.  To them, that place is home. To me, it marks years of Biblical legacy and beauty being used just how I imagine Jesus would... to serve the least of these. 
We had a Merry Christmas and love you all,
The Lauens

Church Day

We talked to the Pastor of Love&Justice Church today about becoming members. This Church is young but, we both see God doing big things within them. Their pastor is young but, biblically honest and you can't help but melt at the sight of babies clapping along to worship. The things we learn there matter and come from Scripture, and it's been a while since either of us felt that way about a Church.

Today we learned about the body of Christ and roles we play in it...
Being married is all about roles. Being married is helping me better understand mine within my marriage and within the Church at large.

Our lives keep getting more and more complex and therefore, so do the roles that we play. Understanding how to live out faith is the only thing that makes all this change work. There is a big difference between being the girlfriend of a youth pastor and being the wife while he performs a child's funeral; but... it works the same in love.  That's what I'm learning recently. In learning how to be a godly wife and friend, love is ultimate. All spiritual gifts are cultivated by loving God and people more.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."                                                                          

1 Corinthians 13