Over the last several years, the Worship Committee has encouraged you to bring symbols of your work to church on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend. Sometimes you remember to bring a tangible symbol of your daily work as part of your gift to God; sometimes in the rush of a holiday weekend you forget; and sometimes you tell me it seems strange to link the two worlds in which you live--your Monday-through-Saturday life and your Sunday life.

Connecting our faith and daily lives is one of the greatest challenges of the Christian faith. Ours is not a religion which promotes the escape of the individual from this world into a better one. Although we trust that ultimately we will leave this world and live eternally with God, we are reminded by the actions and words of Jesus himself that our focus is to be on this world and our life here. Jesus' parables, healings, and teachings were set in common, everyday life situations. He used articles of everyday life to illustrate his message. It would seem clear that Jesus wanted us to understand that people would be engaged in his teachings through their daily lives.

Unfortunately, some Christians have gotten too good at separating our "church lives" from our "daily lives." In my childhood home, for example, we designated some clothes as Sunday clothes--much too nice to be worn for our daily lives! The benefit of this practice was that it emphasized the holiness of God's house and of our worship. But that message can create too great a gap between our Sundays and our Mondays.

As Christians we are called to wear the "clothes" of our everyday lives into worship or perhaps to wear our "Sunday clothes" to work! That is to say, we are to seek to worship God with our whole lives, to connect our work on Monday with the work of the people of God on Sunday which is our worship. Perhaps some of us need the reminder of dressing up on Sunday to remind us to give God our best. Perhaps some of us need the reminder of dressing up on Mondays to remind us that worship and work are closely related.

I invite you to offer your daily work to God in prayer:

--visualize the people with whom you car pool, work, study, share meals and fellowship,

--think of your talents, your struggles, your accomplishments, your dreams,

--imagine presenting before God your daily calendar, your mental picture of the day.

Bring worship and daily life closer together in your experience. God's blessings will surely increase in the lives of each one of us.

Thanks be to God!
Susan