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For Wilshire Baptist Church

Driving through our neighborhood last week I noticed the giant Halloween skeleton in a neighbor’s front yard was wearing a Santa hat. The skeletal dog at its feet was wearing a bright red scarf. Apparently after Halloween they skipped right over Thanksgiving to get to Christmas, but that seems to be the trend everywhere.

Perhaps it’s because Thanksgiving doesn’t have any fun characters to shape into inflatables or outline in festive lights. Halloween has ghosts, goblins and skeletons. Christmas has Santa, reindeer, snow people and animated characters from holiday movies. But Thanksgiving? I’ve seen a few cartoonish turkeys, but it’s hard to have fun with pilgrims and indigenous people with so much angst about that history today.

Continue reading “Give Thanksgiving Its Due”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I was looking at my Amazon account recently to reorder something and got sidetracked by the log of all the purchases we’ve made over the years. It impressed me to see how using the online resource is as easy as whispering a prayer.

When we started using the site almost 15 years ago, we were mostly buying books or music for ourselves, or giving gift cards for others to do the same. And we’d use it just a few times a year; some years we didn’t use it at all.

Continue reading “Blessings Delivered”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

What began Sunday as an exercise to help a pastoral resident nail down names and faces turned into a revealing look at what makes us unique and what draws us together.

First year pastoral resident Jordann McMahan came to Epiphany to share her faith journey and then she planned to dive into the scriptures, but first she wanted to get to know us better. She asked us each to tell our name, how long we’ve been at Wilshire, and our favorite ice cream flavor. 

Continue reading “Names, Flavors, Years”