Revitalize Your Church

Morning glory, starlit sky, soaring music, scholar’s truth, flight of swallows, autumn leaves, memory’s treasure, grace of youth: Open are the gifts of God, gifts of love to mind and sense; hidden is love’s agony, love’s endeavor, love’s expense. Love that gives, gives ever more, gives with zeal, with eager hands, spares not, keeps not, all out-pours, ventures all its all expends. Drained is love in making full, bound in setting others free, poor in making many rich, weak in giving power to be. Therefore he who shows us God helpless hangs upon the tree; and the nails and crown of thorns tell of what God’s love must be. Here is God: no monarch he, throned in easy state to reign; here is God, whose arms of love aching, spent, the world sustain. (W. H. Vanstone)

“I watched them tearing a building down, A gang of men in a busy town. With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell, They swung a beam, and the side wall fell. I asked the foreman: "Are these skilled-- And the men you'd hire if you had to build?" He gave me a laugh and said: "No, indeed! Just common labor is all I need. I can wreck in a day or two What builders have taken a year to do." And I thought to myself as I went my way, Which of these roles have I tried to play? Am I a builder who works with care Measuring life by a rule and square? Am I shaping my deeds to a well made Plan, Patiently doing the best I can? Or am I a wrecker, who walks the town Content with the labor of tearing down?” -- Edgar Guest