"But the Lord said to Ananias, 'Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.'" -- Acts 9:15-16 [NIV]

This is from the Bible reading in which we are to ground ourselves for the Official Board meeting tomorrow at church. The Scripture for the meeting is actually Acts 9:1-22, but the extract above is what stood out for me when I read the passage. What I got out of it is that there are hard decisions ahead on the journey that our church is taking and also for tomorrow's meeting. As well, we should not expect things to be handed to us on a silver platter.

I forgot to mention in my blog entry yesterday that two of the members of the Discernment committee stood up and spoke to the congregation about what the committee has been doing and what we are wrestling with. I think they did a very good job of conveying to the congregation the challenges that lay ahead, both for the committee and also for the congregation.

There is one thing I have yet to come to grips with: the fact that my memory is not as good as it used to be. I used to be able to not take notes at a meeting and I would remember all the pertinent information, which of course meant that I would not bother taking notes. So nowadays I still sometimes do not bother taking notes, except that now I do not remember the important stuff. For example, at our last Discernment committee meeting, the facilitator gave us examples of format for a vision statement. It sounded very obvious at the time so I did not write it down; of course now I cannot remember anything about it. Which makes it hard to work on refining the ideas we have into some kind of cohesive statements.

God Bless You!