Thursday Thirteen #1: Thirteen Ways and Places to Worship

February 22, 2007

It is not nec­es­sary, of course, to be inside a par­tic­u­lar struc­ture in order to wor­ship the Divine Cre­ator. And, in fact, as the Amer­i­can Her­itage Dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion set forth above shows, the act of wor­ship­ing does not involve any par­tic­u­lar action or behav­ior. Wor­ship­ping can be as sim­ple as hon­or­ing and lov­ing the Divine Cre­ator which is some­thing I do, con­sciously or sub­con­sciously, every moment of every day.

Here are thir­teen of the ways and places that I have been wor­ship­ping since flee­ing the insti­tu­tional church:

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Blog Your Blessings Sunday

February 18, 2007

Today being Sun­day, I again enjoyed some time to myself engag­ing in my own form of wor­ship. As I was doing so, my thoughts went to the one and only per­son from my for­mer con­gre­ga­tion that I can truly say I miss.So today, he is the focus of my post about my blessings.

The gen­tle­man in ques­tion is 81 years young and I don’t use that cliché lightly. He not only appears and moves as though he is much younger than his chrono­log­i­cal age, he is truly “young at heart” and in spirit. He always has a hug, and words of affir­ma­tion and inspi­ra­tion for those around him.

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Sound Byte Saturday #1

February 17, 2007

My first con­tri­bu­tion to Sound Byte Sat­ur­day is one of my all-time favorite songs by John Michael Tal­bot, “Come, Wor­ship the Lord.”

You can lis­ten by click­ing on that selec­tion in the mp3 player in the sidebar.

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Not Just Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2007

If you are inter­ested in read­ing about St. Trifun’s Day (Feb­ru­ary 14), pay a visit to zzz’s cre­ative mess. You’ll learn a lot!

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Wordless Wednesday #1

February 13, 2007

Wel­come back to On the Hori­zon! So glad you’re vis­it­ing again. Be sure to leave a com­ment and add any posts that you like to the var­i­ous social book­mark­ing sites using the links just below the posts. Thanks for stopping by!

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Blog Your Blessings Sunday

February 11, 2007

I am very late get­ting this posted! That doesn’t mean I’m not grate­ful and don’t have bless­ings to enu­mer­ate here. Oh, I do! That’s part of why I’m so late.

I am grate­ful that the Divine Cre­ator has been work­ing on my heart. You see, I have a lot of friends and even some rel­a­tives who still belong to the church I left. And that can make things kind of awkward.

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Detoxing from Church

February 5, 2007

That’s the title of a really inter­est­ing arti­cle I stum­bled upon tonight. Click here to read it in its entirety.

The author, a pas­tor who left tra­di­tional orga­nized reli­gion to form a new kind of com­mu­nity of believ­ers, makes the point that we get addicted to the for­mal struc­tures of the church. We get used to hav­ing wor­ship planned for and deliv­ered to us, serv­ing and using church to pro­vide us with a rea­son to exist. “I need dis­ci­ple­ship and Chris­t­ian growth. So I go to my local church to attend Sun­day ser­vices, Bible stud­ies and small groups where some­one opens the Bible and tells me what it says and how it should apply to my life.” In other words, we become incred­i­bly lazy, fail­ing to fully explore our faith because we rely upon some­one else to spoon-feed it to us.

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Blog Your Blessings Sunday: Thankfulness — A Way of Life

February 4, 2007

Last Sun­day I posted about giv­ing thanks in all things, and I had a week that included some inter­est­ing moments, as you can read about below. But I am thank­ful even for those times because I learn so much from them.

I am doing fairly well in my efforts to be thank­ful. I have remem­bered to be thank­ful each day, although I don’t always remem­ber as soon as I would like to. Some­times I have “oh, yeah …” moments when I find myself real­iz­ing that my thank­ful atti­tude in kick­ing in later than it should be. I think I am going to post a lit­tle reminder in my office. I just have to fig­ure out where to put it so that it is notice­able to me, but not nec­es­sar­ily every­one else who enters that space. That will help me remem­ber to stop and say a prayer of thanks when I am frus­trated with or aggra­vated by some­thing hap­pen­ing in the workplace.

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