custom

Thursday January 3^rd, Luke 2:  41 Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. 42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom.  We have just moved through the Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas and New Years.  The days are getting longer, here in Anchorage we are currently gaining about twenty seconds a day, and soon we will be moving into the Lent, Spring Break, Holy Week, Easter and then Pentecost.  What customs do you or your family have for these seasons?  Do they include worship?  There are so many I only see at worship on Christmas and Easter, the CEO’s or Christmas and Easter onlys.  For those for whom life is too busy and you find yourself on the road, there is always 10W (www.10worship.blogspot.com) These are short 10 minute worship services on both the RCL lectionary and Narrative lectionary for Sundays and festive days and you can sign up to get them emailed to your cell phone if you are good at that sort of thing.  We also have a web radio where we broadcast our worship service and invite people to join us from their remote cabin locations for communion during that part of the service.  Just go to the church web site (www.coslc.ws) and click on the link for COSLC Web Radio at 10am Anchorage time and join us. With all the options available to us it would be easy to be critical about those who never seem to connect, and yet there is something there in the back of their minds, something that compels them to at least make the connection on these special occasions.  Who knows how God is working in them.  Perhaps the reason they don’t join in worship more often is they don’t feel welcome because someone is always saying, I don’t see you very often, instead of simply welcoming them. Who knows when or if their worship life as a family will expand into something more often.  But for Jesus and his family, worship was their “custom.”  This new year, make it more of your custom also.