Thanks so much!
Let me know if you have questions.  Hope you all can participate!

Melissa Owen

Personal Jesus – Without realizing it, it’s easy to want God to do things on our terms and on our schedule. It’s as if we want our own “personal Jesus” to do our bidding for us. In this series we will be looking at some people in the Bible who wanted to personalize Jesus to suit their wants. Join us for this four week series between now and Easter.

9:30 am – 11:00 am

All of the women of Essential are invited to enjoy a delicious light breakfast, craft projects, gifts, and Bible study.

Come as you are, come when you can, anytime. There is no homework, and no time commitment required.

We are here for you! Childcare is provided for $5 per family.

God has done immeasurably more than we ever asked him to do when we set out to start Essential Church. We had hoped to be a church of at least around 100 to 150 by the end of the first year. We thought that was an ambitious goal. We had planned on meeting in a rented location for the next ten years. We also wanted to see at least 10 people be baptized.Our motto for the year was “If it were easy, then we wouldn’t need God.”

So here we are one year later. We’re a church of around 300 people, we have a $4,000,000 facility to meet in, we’ve had over 500 people visit the church, and seen 39 people be baptized (24 here at our church and 15 on a mission trip). I can’t wait to see and experience everything God has in store for us as a church in the next year.

A 28 year old man was pulled from out of the rubble in Haiti today, four weeks after the earthquake. Doctors are confused a little about his situation because it is humanly impossible to stay alive for this long without water.

From CNN:
“The man told doctors that someone was bringing him water while he was trapped, but doctors told CNN that he sounded confused and at times appeared to believe he was still under the rubble.  Connelly said the man must have had some water during the past month to have survived, but Connelly wasn’t sure how he would have had access to it.”

“Reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta said the 28-year-old man was severely dehydrated but that he survived because a man in a white coat brought him water time to time. Officials are checking the veracity of the man’s story.  Gupta said the man “must have had water” to survive for nearly four weeks pinned in the rubble.”

Uh….does this remind anyone of 1 Kings 19:5-13?

⁵ Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep.  All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” ⁶ He looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. ⁷ The angel of the LORD came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” ⁸ So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. ⁹ There he went into a cave and spent the night.

And the word of the LORD came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ¹⁰ He replied, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”¹¹ The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. ¹² After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. ¹³ When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.  Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

CNN Article

Many of you have asked me for more information on Matt’s story. The following are some links that you might be interested in:

• AP Article on Matt’s Story that he mentioned in the video I showed.
• Matt’s Blog where you can see video updates as they are posted.
• This past week’s message can be found here.

Materials from this past week’s message can be found below

Opening Video

First Video Update from Matt Chandler

Second Video Update from Matt Chandler

Audio Clip from Matt Chandler’s Sermon on Ecclesiastes 7 from September 17, 2006

Chandler-Ecc7

Well in case you thought that all that biblical stuff was outdated and doesn’t still apply any more, well read the following article posted today in London’s Telegraph Newspaper by Henry Samuel.

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Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.

Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.

Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

“More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.”

However, for many years he said he was simply not “brave” enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence.

The tipping point came while he was on a three-week holiday with his wife to islands of Hawaii.

“It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is,” he said. “In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn’t met a single real person – that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real.”

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. “I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty,” he said.

Suddenly, he realised that “if I don’t do it now I won’t do it for the rest of my life”.

Mr Rabeder decided to raffle his Alpine home, selling 21,999 lottery tickets priced at just £87 each. The Provence house in the village of Cruis is on sale at the local estate agent.

All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt “free, the opposite of heavy”.

But he said he did not judge those who chose to keep their wealth. “I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul.”

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Think Heaven

by Karen Johnson on Thursday, February 04, 2010

Those words tell me that death for a believer in Christ, like my son Joey, is merely a matter of geography–alive, but in a different place. Though we are suffering loss, Joey isn’t. He simply shed a fragile skin, but he’s alive, he never died, he lives in spite of dying–however you say it, it’s good news. I think I thought I believed that before Joey departed, but then the unthinkable happened and the reality of the death of our beloved was so much more horrible than I ever imagined, I just wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

If God has done anything in me since Joey left, it’s been to re-shape my view of Heaven. Over and over again, I see and hear things that rebuild my confidence in its reality. I’m taking it personally. I believe God is on a campaign to convince me of the reality of Heaven. And it’s not just from His Word, which is ultimately powerful, but He is corroborating His Word from nature, from history, from music, from movies, from the longings of our hearts for perfection, beauty and love.

It’s safe to say it’s a conviction now. I don’t doubt it anymore. I don’t dread it anymore. It’s vivid and full of life and creation. It’s better to me than earth, this place that I used to love so well that I tried to squeeze every bit of life out of it. I confess I mistook it for heaven and counted on it too much for my happiness. I’ve had to do quite a bit of reorganizing my life around some new truth. But now I’m certain that the place of my dreams lies in my future. And now, more often than not, I’m restlessly biding my time for my Homecoming day, and instead of longing for Joey to return, I long to go there and be with him.

Related Articles by topic on Karen’s blog:  death, god, heaven