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Mid-Week Missive |
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| Author: | Brad Miller | Created: | 10/30/2007 2:52 AM |  | | What is happening at BCC? |
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| By Brad Miller on7/21/2010 10:12 AM | |
| Greetings on this hot and going to get hotter day,
I have been thinking about home a lot lately. Not just the place I call “home” but the whole idea of what “home” really is. It probably started about two weeks ago when I was talking to my sister about plans for our annual family reunion at our cottage in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the end of July. 16 of the 18 members of the family will be there, the only 2 missing will be our nephew Daniel and his wife Rachel, who are expecting their first baby in September and so can’t travel from Seattle. It is always great when we can all get together, and getting together at Munuscong makes it all the better, because that is one of the places that I definitely think of as “home.” Summers growing up my parents ran a church camp that had once been a fishing and hunting resort owned by my Great Uncle and built by my grandfather. From the 1920’s on, it has been a special place for my family. Today, no less than 8 cottages on the river b ... |  | |
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| | Thankful | |
| By Brad Miller on7/15/2010 3:05 PM | |
| Greetings on this steamy day…
All week long I have been singing a song inside my head…”It is good to give thianks…it is good to give thanks to the Lord…” Those of you who were at “Praise on Peachtree” last Sunday know that the theme was gratitude and that song was one of the centerpieces of the service. As I have gone through the week, I have found myself giving thanks for so many things. Big things and small things. Mundane things and extraordinary things. Things that can bring a tear to my eye and things that can make me laugh out loud. And I find myself in a much better place when this happens.
Which brings me to the question of the hour: do I feel closer to God because I give thanks? Or is it my closeness to God that causes me to give thanks? Sort of a chicken and egg thing, really. While still wrestling with the definitive answer, I’m leaning toward to saying yes to both questions. There are just days when the sun shines and the sky is blue and the h ... | | |
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| | Standing on Their Shoulders | |
| By Brad Miller on7/15/2010 3:02 PM | |
| Greetings!
Yesterday we began the “Visioning” Process for BCC. We held the first of our five scheduled “cluster meetings” aimed at getting the input of the friends and members of BCC as to what they need from the church, what we are doing well and how we can move into the future serving God’s will and God’s people. It’s the kind of exercise that is necessary every once in a while, especially in the midst of changing times. Since I first arrived at BCC almost 9 years ago, we are a different church. Children have grown into young adults; some parents are now empty nesters; new members have joined; new babies have come along. The last year or so have brought added change, and not of the welcome variety. The changing economic situation has impacted us all, and that leads to new stresses and strains. So, now is a good time to take stock, to ask questions, to make plans for the future. And so, we are gathering in various groupings to do just that. Over the course of the next two week ... | | |
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| | How Important is the Bible? | |
| By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:11 AM | |
| Greetings!
I gave up a long time ago recommending movies to people because I discovered that movies that I find riveting don’t always hit other people the same way. (Isn’t that right Rev. Jennifer?) These days the only two movies I wholeheartedly recommend are “Field of Dreams” (especially for fathers, sons, and baseball fans) and “Ordinary People”, a profoundly real movie about the pain and heartbreak and joy of life in late 20th century America. Those are probably my two favorite movies of all time, although any good (or bad for that matter) Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant movie is always a good bet.
Now, all of this is my way of leading to saying that I saw a movie this week that got me to thinking, but this is not, I repeat, this is not a recommendation for people to see it. Some might like it; many would not. Having said all that, I recently saw a movie called “The Book of Eli” starring Denzel Washington. It was one of those p ... | | |
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| | Facing Fear | |
| By Brad Miller on6/22/2010 2:18 PM | |
| Greetings on another steamy day,
Recently Carol and I went to a play in which one of the characters uttered this line: “It scares me so much that I just know I have to do it.” As the line was delivered, I knew that even though it got a big laugh from the audience, it was profound and instructive beyond the attention given it. It was used to illustrate what a free spirit the person who uttered it was and it served it’s purpose well. It got me thinking about times I had stepped up to my fears, and what the result of that was.
When I was about 14 our Boy Scout troop was chosen as the Governors Honor Guard, which meant that we got to spend two weeks on Mackinac Island in a barracks behind the Governors summer residence. We put up the flag every morning, we worked as guides in Fort Michilimackinac, we got to meet the governor and his wife, and each day about 3:00 we got to go to the Grand Hotel swimming pool. The Grand Hotel is an enormous turn of the century hot ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 6, 2010 "Are You Happy?" Psalm 146 | |
| By Brad Miller on6/8/2010 1:49 PM | |
| We live in a society that holds happiness as one of the great goals of life. Our marketing culture points to happiness with almost every advertisement we see. You certainly can’t be happy unless you have the latest, the most stylish, the fastest, the cleanest, the tastiest, the best. Our consumer culture is based on the notion that we need things to be happy.
But it goes even deeper than that. We look to our leaders to provide that happiness, too. Every election cycle, which now is every day of every year, we see people running for office that market themselves much like Madison Avenue markets consumer goods. And what they are selling is the fact that their candidate can make us happy. Oh, this is not a new phenomenon: from the 1920’s on, the theme song for one of our two major political parties has been “Happy Days are Here Again!”
It’s not just our leaders and our consumer culture that places such a big emphasis on happiness. How many parents have told ... | | |
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| | Sabbath | |
| By Brad Miller on6/3/2010 2:15 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
I got a new phone a while back.
Oh, it’s not just any phone, it’s the phone that George Jetson could only dream about. On this phone I can check the weather, the stocks, the scores of the Tigers game, answer my e-mail, surf the web, get a joke of the day, a Bible verse a day, tune my guitar (like anyone would notice), order movie tickets, read the newspaper – the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press and the USA Today – read a book, listen to music, watch a tv show, keep my calendar, use it as a compass, use it as a flashlight, use it as a level, get new recipes, check the time in Brussels (hey, I might want to, I have a friend there) play solitaire, find a restaurant, look at a picture of my house from space, look at a picture of your house from space, read a book, add more cowbell whenever needed, identify music on the radio just by holding it up to the speaker, locate my car in a mall parking ... | | |
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| | Remembering Ernie | |
| By Brad Miller on5/12/2010 3:42 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful morning,
Yesterday, I lost one of my heroes. Oh, and I’m not alone. I would guess that millions of people heard of his death and stopped for at least a moment, and remembered Ernie Harwell, who died at the age of 92 after a year long battle with cancer.
Ernie Harwell was “The Voice of the Detroit Tigers” for 42 years, after short stints in New York and Baltimore. In the 1980’s he became the first still-active broadcaster to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is also a resident of the Radio Hall of Fame, the Michigan Hall of Fame and the Sports Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He was the only announcer to be traded for a player! In the late 1940’s, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers wanted to hire Ernie to be the Dodgers broadcaster, but Ernie was under contract as the announcer of the Atlanta Crackers. So, a deal was struck: Ernie went to Brooklyn in exchange for Dodgers backup catcher Cliff Dapper. And the rest, as they s ... | | |
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| | Paying Attention | |
| By Brad Miller on4/21/2010 8:49 AM | |
| Greetings!
On Monday and Tuesday of this week I had the privilege of attending a workshop put on by Fred Craddock and Mike Graves called “The Preacher as Storyteller”. It was a wonderfully enlightening couple of days as it always is when Fred Craddock is involved. Not only is he probably the finest preacher I have ever heard, he is one of the finest people I have ever met. We got to know each other when we served as founding board members of the Atlanta United Divinity Center a few years back and I still count that as an amazing blessing. Whenever I get the chance to listen to him preach or teach, I come away with something that keeps me thinking.
On Tuesday morning Fred told a story about a waitress he met at a Waffle House. He asked for cream for his coffee and she reached into her apron and pulled out about 6 of the little creamer cups. He said that he only needed one and she said, “It’s better to have more than you need than to need more than you have.” ... | | |
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| | Remembering | |
| By Brad Miller on4/14/2010 8:37 AM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
Remembering can lead us to a lot of different places.
This thought crossed my mind this Sunday during Rev. Jennifer’s communion meditation. She said something along the lines that when Jesus said, “Remember me” at the Last Supper, he probably meant more than just, “think of me fondly.” He probably meant that we were to do certain things, act a certain way, as a way to “remember” him. And I think she was right.
It crossed my mind again earlier this week when I realized that my mother’s birthday is just around the corner. She’s been gone almost 12 years and the overwhelming feeling I get when I remember her is one of gratitude. Gratitude that I was so blessed to have her as my mother. Sometimes funny stories pop into my head, times when she laughed so hard she started to cry and then the laughter/crying turned into that weird noiseless laughter that left her coughing for breath. I remember times with fam ... | | |
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