Wed
Jul 1
2009
Mitch McCartney
Director of Communications and Development
Nebraska Synod, ELCA
I’m not sure if it was this past Christmas or the Christmas before that. We had a giving tree in church and on it were placed the many paper cutout stars, each of which represented a gift that we could go and purchase for a needy child in town. As had been the case every year, stars were disappearing from the tree as church members were claiming them to go and make their gift purchases.
One of the stars on the tree this particular year was for a little boy who had asked for a bicycle for Christmas. That star remained on the tree for most of December, presumably because the size of the young boy’s wish was considerably larger than the simpler, less expensive requests for dolls, toy trucks and stuffed animals.
The weekend before Christmas my friend Dave came up to me in the church lobby and asked if I had some cash on me that I could contribute toward getting a bike for a young boy. Sure enough, I looked over at the tree and the star was gone.
Dave explained he took the star because he knew the boy’s wish was probably too large to ask any one person to fulfill. But he knew our men’s ministry group, if we put the spare cash in our wallets together, could come up with enough to purchase the bike.
And as I dug into my pocket to throw in some cash, so did the other men in our group that morning. We did so because it was an opportunity for us to show our Christian love in a way that this young boy would certainly remember. We did so because when Dave asked, we trusted him and knew he would make sure the money was used as it was intended, to do God’s work. And while each of us probably could have purchased the bike on our own, we all contributed because we knew that together we could do much more than any one of us could do alone.
Isn’t that what it means to be the church?
So often I hear people ask, “What is a synod?” The word “synod” has Greek origins and means “walking together.” That means all of us, all 261 mission centers in the Nebraska Synod, are in a walk together as we endeavor to do Christ’s work on this earth.
There are some wonderful ministry stories about what we as the church do here in Nebraska, in this country, and around the world, with the blessings and resources that we share with one another. And there is much, much more to do.
I hope to be able to visit you and your mission center personally in the coming months to share those stories of how we as the church are able to show our Christian love to others, how the church is responsibly managing the resources we have been blessed with in order to do God’s work, and how we can do so much more together than any of us could do alone.
Blessings2U.
