A small team of ladies serves Elaine Kinney each week. They could use some additional help from as many who are willing and able to assist. Connie Noel describes the need as follows:

Arrive at her home in Cary (off Walnut Street) at approximately 9 a.m. Assist her with her morning routine: help getting dressed, assist her with putting on her back brace, help her brush her teeth, prepare breakfast, and simply visit with her and talk. Connie could use help from you if you are able to serve weekly, every other week, or to fill-in on an as-needed basis.

Connie adds: “I have found helping Elaine to be a blessing in my life – time to slow down, unwind a bit from my crazy schedule, and have some fellowship.”

If you are able to serve, please contact Connie on her cell phone 539-9969. If you would like to go along with someone to first learn what is involved, that can easily be arranged. Connie said she can have you come along as early as this Thursday or Friday. Thank you for considering how you might care for our sister in need.

The Pastoral Team

If you are able to help, please contact John Schlax.

The focus will be on parenting kids 0-12 years old. We want to hear again God’s word on this critical area of life and learn what it means to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

Some of the questions we’ll address: Should we spank in the name of “discipline”? Is a “time-out” a better approach? What should I be teaching them about the Lord in these years? Why is my life like a Motrin commercial? — okay, maybe not all of them.

After our main session, we’ll divide into three groups for discussion and Q/A.

If you are single, a teen, or maybe have grown kids, please consider offering to watch the children of others so that they can attend (childcare will not be provided).

Light refreshments will be available (muffins and coffee, etc.).

We look forward to seeing you May 1st. Feel free to invite friends and family members.

Daniel

Tom McClusky with the Family Research Council has a good summary of where things stand in Congress right now and some specific ways the health-care overhaul would fund abortion (http://www.thecloakroomblog.com/2010/03/eight-reasons-abortion-is-in-the-health-care-overhaul/).

Please call or e-mail your representatives right away. Although either is valuable, phone calls typically have more weight.

David Bass

SGC Pro-life Coordinator

Thank you for your enthusiastic response for the ladies’ book studies. We clearly have enough interest to officially sign up for our groups.

As of now we will have four groups. We are assuming more ladies will register during this sign-up and we are prepared to form more groups as needed.

These are the groups and their location. Please e-mail Cassie at csasser@sovgracenc.org with your first and second (if possible) choice.

Lost in the Middle by Paul Tripp will meet at the home of Donna Kumorek in Cary on Monday evenings.

Don’t Make Me Count to Three will meet at the home of Peggy Coda in Apex on Tuesday evenings at 7:30.

How People Change will meet at the home of Tinea Bradley in Raleigh on Tuesday evenings.

A Shelter in the Time of Storm will meet at the home of Cassie Sasser in Cary on Saturday mornings.

Fearlessly Feminine is an excellent book which has not had many takers as of yet. If enough ladies would like to read this book, we will start another group for this book too.

We plan to begin the week of March 8 and meet through the week of May 17. The groups will meet for six weeks on the weeks that home groups do not meet.

Brad Hodges has put in an order for these books and they will probably be available in the church book store by this Sunday. Of course you can always order them online as well.

Please e-mail Cassie with any questions.

Looking forward to great times together,

Cassie Sasser

• Milestones within our church (baptisms, new members, babies born);
• Our staff and their responsibilities;
• Potential developments in years ahead;
• Key points about our financial health;
• Various parts of our church life like the youth group and children’s ministry;
• Maybe even about our website and online directory.

As advertised, we’ll reward your efforts by having A LOT of ice-cream for you and your family.

See you this Sunday night at SGC at 6pm.

Thanks!

Daniel

I have the joy of reporting to you some changes that are coming soon to our Children’s Ministry. I am aware that many of us are not accustomed to using the words “joy” and “change” in the same sentence. However, this is truly the kind of change that we as a church can rejoice in.

God has continued to bless our church with significant growth, and as a result there are a number of space challenges throughout our Children’s Ministry that need to be addressed. The areas where we are currently feeling this growth the most are in our 1-year-old through 5-K classes. As a result, it is necessary for us to make the following changes to create the needed space for our preschool-aged children:

* The 1-2 grade class will be relocating to the multipurpose room. They will be joining our 3-4 and 5-6 grade classes. Now, all of our grade school children will share the same space.
* The 4-year-old class will be merging with the 5-K class. Together they will relocate to the current 1-2 grade classroom.
* The 3-year-old class will be relocating to the current 5-K classroom.
* The 2-year-old class will be staying in their existing classroom but will also use the current 3-year-old classroom for expansion.
* The 1-year-old class will be relocating to the classrooms that are currently occupied by the infant nursery and 4-year-old class. These two classrooms have a door between them, which will allow for more flexible use of these two classrooms.
* The infant nursery (0-12 months) will be relocating across the hall to the current 1-year-old classroom.

These changes will take place on Sunday, March 7. The diagram below clearly indicates where each class will meet after the changes have been completed.

If your child(ren) will be affected in anyway by these changes, you will receive written instructions from their teacher(s) over the next few weeks explaining which classroom your child will need to report to on Sunday, March 7.

If you have any questions concerning these changes, please feel free to contact me at the church office.

Sincerely,

Walt Briley

In response to St. Augustine’s conclusion that it’s best not to love too much the things of this world because they will not last, C.S. Lewis says the following:

“I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’

“To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less….We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he ‘loved.’ St. Paul has a higher authority with us than St. Augustine—St. Paul who shows no sign that he would not have suffered like a man, and no feeling that ought not so to have suffered, if Epaphroditus had died (Philippians, II, 27)…..

“There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket and coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell”
–C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 110-112

“Paul here reflects the early Christian understanding of the church as an extended family, whose members, bound together in intimate fellowship, should exhibit toward one another a heartfelt and consistent concern”
–Doublas Moo, Romans, 777

“God is love. Again, ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us’ (1 John, IV, 10). We must not begin with mysticism, with the creature’s love for God, or with the wonderful foretastes of the fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly life. We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy….In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give….
“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
–C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Thanks!

Daniel

For more information, or if you are interested, please contact Gail Barnes.