CCC Blog

You Made This Happen!

THANK YOU for helping with Preschool Sunday! Your acts of   service, food, and participation made the day a success! Ten      Preschool families enjoyed a puppet show, games, songs, color sheets, a small toy from the toy chest, and a delicious meal!

 THANK YOU for serving at Teacher Appreciation Week! The CE       committee bought food, prepared a meal, and served teachers and staff at Franklin School to show our appreciation for their service.

I am grateful to the Lord for the honor of serving alongside you in His ministry work here at Central Christian Church. Our Church’s  ministry is more effective because of your love and sacrifice. I look forward to even greater things as God enables us together to impact our community and world for the sake of the Gospel!

Peace to You!

Tina Miller

Associate Minister

CE & Family Life

“Seeing is Believing”

But Thomas … one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came …  he said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails… I will not believe.”                                                                                                                                    John 20:24-25

It was exactly one week after Easter in 2007 or 2008. We were living in Baton Rouge at the time. It was a glorious afternoon in early spring and after worship I decided to go for a run. I had just turned onto Hagerstown from Stones River (all the streets in our subdivision were named for Civil War battle sites) when I stepped on a nail. I didn’t see it, but didn’t need to. I felt it.  It was a biggie,  penetrating the heel of my shoe all the way into my skin. I certainly didn’t need to go to the hospital but the nail had punctured the skin and left a decent-sized blood stain on my sock. I had to call off the run and hobble home. I limped in the door to find Amy and Thomas in the living room. “You’ll never guess what happened to me,” I said and proceeded to tell them about my injury. My son looked up from the page he was coloring (he was about 5 or 6 at the time) and said with great boldness, “No way, dad.  I don’t believe you. I won’t believe you unless you show me the nail mark in your foot first.” Did I mention his name is Thomas?

A week (after the resurrection) … Thomas was with them … and Jesus came and stood among them and said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my   hands …”

John 20:26-27

 The Disciple Thomas will be our focus in worship this week. Unfortunately, he’s remembered for the name “Doubting Thomas,” as this one event in his life has determined the way history views him. But his skepticism represents a fundamental theme in the Gospel of John — Believing without seeing. Not   everyone, after all, would (or will) have an experience with the risen Jesus Christ in the flesh as the disciples did. In that sense, the story of Thomas asking to see the nail marks is designed to move us to v. 29 of chapter 20. Jesus said, “Have you believed because you have seen me (Thomas)?  Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have come to believe.”

Doubt and skepticism are things we experience because we are human. Even the popular phrase, “Trust but verify,” is a bit of an oxymoronic homage to doubt and skepticism (after all, can you really trust if you have to verify first?).  And yet as Thomas shows us faith does emerge from skepticism. Untold billions have come to follow the path of Christ over a span of two millennia without having “seen” the risen Christ. We will spend the sermon time this week considering how faith emerges from doubt. I invite you to think of times in your life when you have been skeptical, but God gave you faith in the midst of it (maybe it was a financial situation you came through; or a health situation; or something else). Some situations are admittedly easier to find trust in the midst of than others, but God desires our faith to be strengthened through them all – and not be dependent on concrete and tangible realities for its existence.   

  Blessings – Michael

French Fry Run Results

On Sunday, Christine Lyman-Harm and Janet Lyman defended their title as makers of the best "fries" in      Decatur. We went to McDonald's, Wendy's, and Culvers, but Christine and Janet blew them all away. This makes three years in a row, and they are early favorites to take the crown next year.

“A-Ha Moments”

In our scripture last Sunday (John 20:1-10), one of Jesus’ disciples had a profound “A-Ha” moment. He’s officially called the “Other Disciple” (as compared to Peter), or “the Beloved Disciple” (because he’s known as the “one whom Jesus loved”). Tradition claims that he is John the author of the Gospel and that’s how we referred to him in the sermon.  When he arrived at the tomb on the first Easter, entered the tomb and saw the stone rolled away and linen wrappings on the ground, he “sees and believes.” At that moment, everything that Jesus had done and said came back to him and a light of faith turned on within him. “A-Ha,” he realized, “I get it now.”  He didn’t yet understand the full extent of the resurrection, but faith changed him. 

As it so happens, I finished a book this past Saturday called “The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South.” It’s the true story of a former Grand Cyclops of the KKK and an African-American female neighborhood organizer working together on a school desegregation project in Durham, NC, in the early 1970s. From this work developed an enduring friendship such that when CP Ellis died in 2005, Ann Atwater was the only     non-family member to attend the funeral. Ellis, the former Grand Cyclops, had an “A-Ha” moment through his interactions with Atwater. But author Osha Gray Davidson writes this about it: “The single unifying element in the history of transformations in the West, (such as) Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus … is the instantaneousness of the process … the psychological equivalent of a lightning strike…” This was not Ellis’ experience.  Just because he had discovered a commonality of experience between himself and Atwater didn’t mean he would immediately leave the Klan and join the NAACP. But still, it is no  exaggeration to say that C.P. had been profoundly moved by the experience and even changed by it – although he could not have said how. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that a door previously unknown to C.P. had been opened. 

Ellis’ “A-ha” moment was not sudden change, but more like a slow, meandering journey of transformation and it echoed in my mind as I heard Jodie Walwer’s testimony in worship on Sunday.  She described part of her life story, reflecting honestly on a state of discontentment she was experiencing several years ago; how this led to continual prayer about her situation but the realization that no sudden lights or “neon signs” were given in return; yet how God guided her to a conversation with a career counselor and how that one conversation began a long and slow – but steady – path toward career change, and ultimate hope from an initial place of despair. 

 God moves in each of our lives in different ways.  Sometimes they are with   sudden lightning flashes or in single moments of new perspective and  understanding.  And sometimes they are in ways that shape and refine us over days, weeks, months and possibly years.  As you reflect on your own life story, how has God worked in your life to create transformation within you?  How has the process of coming to “A-Ha” unfolded in your life?      

Blessings – Michael