In this category, you will find many inspirational stories to be used for your Church Bulletins, Church Newsletters and/or Inspirational E-mails.
One of the more difficult things for someone on a weekly basis is to prepare content for the church bulletin or newsletter.
Usually, it’s a tug-of-war trying to get information from department or ministry leaders concerning the events taking place soon. Plus, the attempt to get an article from the Pastor can be an adventure due to the busy-ness of their schedule.
We want to do our part by adding a new category called “Church Bulletin Articles”. These will be brief and inspirational and may be used within the context of the church communications to the congregation via e-mail, bulletin or newsletter.
Perhaps some of them would even work as Sermon Illustrations! Stop back often as we plan to build the selection in the weeks and months ahead.
In reality, all our letters can be easily modified for that purpose. So, some of the content will be similar to our letters, while most of it will be new stories.
Joni Eareckson's story is now well known to us both through her books and the movie about her paralysis as a teenager and her amazing fight back to a useful and productive life of ministry through her art. From the preface of Joni:
Isolated, by itself, what is a minute? Merely a measurement of time. There are sixty in an hour, 1,440 in a day. At seventeen, I had already ticked off more than 9 million of them in my life. Yet, in some cosmic plan, this single minute was isolated. Into these particular sixty seconds was compressed more significance than all the millions of minutes marking my life prior to this instant.
Many years ago, there was found in an African mine the most magnificent diamond in the world's history. It was presented to the king of England to blaze in his crown or state. The king sent it to Amsterdam to be cut. It was put into the hands of an expert lapidary. And what do you suppose he did with it? He took the gem of priceless value, and cut a notch in it. Then he struck a hard blow with his instrument and–lo!–the superb jewel lay in his hand cleft in two. Did he do this out of recklessness, wastefulness, and criminal carelessness? Indeed not! For days and weeks that blow had been studied and planned. Drawings and models had been made of the gem. Its quality, its defects, its lines of cleavage had all been studied with minutest care. The man to whom it was committed was one of the most skillful lapidaries in the world.
In a small town in the midwest where I spent six years of my early youth, there lived a mentally retarded adult named Myron. It was during Depression years and there was no place for Myron to be “kept” but at home. He lived there with his mother and they survived on the work that Myron did as a gardener.
He had a proverbial “green thumb,” and the places where he did the gardening were easy to identify. The lawns, shrubs, hedges, flowers–all showed care, skill, and loving attention. Myron also did “volunteer” work. He cut grass, raked leaves, and planted flowers in what would otherwise have been unsightly vacant lots. He was probably best known for his “oil can.” He always carried a small can of lubricating oil in his hip pocket. A squeaky door or hinge or gate always got a “free” dose from Myron's oil can.
There was a family in the San Francisco Bay area that grew up with that kind of commitment. The son's name was David Kraft. His father was a pastor, a godly pastor in the South Bay. David Kraft grew up with a father who constantly remembered God's faithfulness in the past so that David might trust in God in all of his tomorrows. David grew up in love with Jesus, and he felt the call of God into the pastoral ministry. He went to Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary.
I took my two youngest kids to the Batavia quarry on my day off a week ago. It has a beautiful sand beach with shallow water. Or you can go out into the deep water and there are some high dives and slides. But if you want to go in the deep water, you've got to get a deep-water pass.
At the beginning of the year, my 7-year-old son, Andrew, got his deep-water pass, but it was not something he did easily. He's a great swimmer; he just doesn't like the pressure of having to do something in front of a couple of lifeguards.
