Feast of Tabernacles preparation

I was in a long morning meeting at Belleville today. The principal theme was this upcoming Sunday's special "Feast of Tabernacles" service. Pastor David Schneier (an American church planter in the Ukraine) and his wife Lesley are in Paris this month for a number of projects, including this one. It should be a festive, celebratory event. See this Sunday's blog for more details.

I had decided to start skipping the team lunch on Tuesdays in order to take advantage of the 1 1/2 hours to work on other projects. Today I was able to correct my meeting notes and read for tomorrow's Torrents of Hope class. Marie called after an hour asking me to come, as they had made a birthday cake for me. So I showed up after an hour. That was very kind of the team to do this.

While there, I had a good talk with one of the single guys at church about singleness, marriage, etc. I'm glad that I had 36 years of life as a single to refer to when talking with singles, as well as 8 years of married life now. God gives grace and wants us to be content in whatever state we're in, even with the particular frustrations that come with it.

One of the lessons that the Feast of Tabernacles shows us is that our lives are precarious. It doesn't take very much to shake them up. This world isn't our permanent home and we are just pilgrims passing through.