From the Pastor
BLESSED TO BE A BLESSING
In mid-June I attended our New England Annual Conference yearly session at Gordon College in Wenham. As I waited for our session to begin on Thursday, I logged onto our church’s e-mail account to read the current mail. To my surprise, I read a note from a woman in a federated (United Methodist/United Church of Christ) church in Kennebunk, Maine. She was inquiring about the pocket prayer shawl ministry at our church and told me that she learned of it from our Bishop’s occasional e-mail column, Partners in Ministry. Again, I searched through the mail that had arrived in the church’s e-mail inbox the day before and there was Bishop Weaver’s column………complete with an entire paragraph telling United Methodists throughout New England about our church’s pocket prayer shawl ministry. The Bishop had been given one of Oakdale’s pocket prayer shawls at a spring event on our Central Massachusetts District by Janice Myers. In his column, he quoted from the tag given with each shawl and told folks that he would be carrying his shawl in his pocket throughout our annual conference session. Indeed, Bishop Weaver did, even standing up one morning before the assembly to take the shawl from his pocket to show everyone. Again he said that he had received this gift from the Prayer Shawl Ministry at Oakdale UMC in West Boylston, MA.
Even before I returned home from that conference session, our e-mail and our phone’s answering machine had received requests for the pattern – one from as far away as Ohio. Many thanks to Kathy Dill, co-chairperson of our Prayer Shaw Ministry, for creating an informational file we could pass on to fulfill those inquiries and to Ernie Gronblom, our webmaster, for answering each request.
As I read each e-mail I realized how blessed Oakdale UMC was in order to be a blessing to others. We can be grateful for Bishop Weaver’s kind recognition of this important ministry and the requests we received for the patterns. Most importantly, we can give glory to God for the opportunity to share one of our ministries with others. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, the ripple effects of this ministry will touch persons we will never meet and in ways we cannot imagine. Such is the holy mystery of God’s Spirit.
“What do we live for,” the English novelist Mary Anne Evans, better known by her nineteenth century pen name, George Eliot, wrote, “if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” Jesus’ entire ministry was devoted to exactly this purpose; he was truly blessed to be a blessing for our lives and our faith journeys and he calls us every day to be the same in the lives of others. Our pocket prayer shawl ministry is one excellent way. What else is God calling us to do?
God’s blessings,
Pastor Elizabeth
Rev. Elizabeth J. Bachelder Smith, Pastor
Oakdale United Methodist Church
West Boylston, MA
