In case you were wondering why Pastor Sara was nowhere to be seen last Sunday, I was away in Italy for a week!  I have two special friends that I’ve known for more than 30 years, and when we all turned 45 and realized that we weren’t getting any younger, we decided to take trips of our own every two years without our children or husbands.  We live in three separate states, each busy with family and professional responsibilities, so we have to intentionally plan time for ourselves to maintain our precious friendships. This was our second international travel after our trip to Paris four years ago.  There are so many interesting cities in Italy, such as Rome, Venice, Florence, Pompeii, and Naples just to name a few, but since we didn’t want to spend all our precious time on the road travelling from one city to another, we decided to spend half of our time in Rome, visiting the many tourist attractions and the remaining days on the beautiful Amalfi Coast located in the southwestern region of Italy, relaxing and enjoying the breathtaking view of the Mediterranean Sea. 
While in Rome we visited many world-famous structures, including the Colosseum, Vatican Museums, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon (ancient Roman temple), and several other ancient landmarks.  The Colosseum was definitely one of the most extraordinary places I’ve visited in my life. It was not just its amazing architecture or impressive size, but the sense of its gory history stirred up something in me. While so many tourists from all over the world were casually strolling through the structure, posing for pictures here and there, it dawned on me that it was here that gladiators engaged in deadly combat and condemned prisoners fought off hungry lions while tens of thousands of Roman citizens were cheering on. During mass battles, the smell of blood and burnt flesh and that of wild animals became unbearable.
According to the tour guide, such violence was considered rousing entertainment.   It also served as a crime deterrent, reminding people of the brutal punishment for criminals and prisoners of war. Another important function of these brutal public events was to give the citizens something to occupy their minds with - to distract them from political and economic problems.  As soon as I heard the word ‘distract,’ I could not help but think of all the year-round sporting events that keep many people occupied and obsessed in the US, while distracting them from dealing with real life problems.  When baseball season nears its end, football season is in full swing. Once football season winds down, basketball games begin. And then back to baseball and so on. Sports - and any other entertainment for that matter - are not harmful in and of themselves.  However, if all our leisure time, energy, and resources are spent on them, Satan surely has succeeded in distracting us from pursuing joy and satisfaction in God.  Just as the emperors used the gladiators and wild animals to create spectacular scenes to control the crowd, Satan has used the media, electronic gadgets, music idols, sporting events, and other means to distract born-again Christians from seeking and fulfilling God’s will for their lives, to render them ineffective as God’s people.  The scheme of the enemy has remained pretty much the same from the very beginning.  It’s to distract us, to keep us occupied with things of this world.  Tragically, too many of us have fallen victim.  We must wake up and walk out of this modern-day Colosseum.

From Pastor Sara’s Heart
October 21, 2012

I am a relatively simple guy.  My daily routine is nothing out of the ordinary: wake up, do devotionals, go to work, eat, relax, spend time with friends, watch tv, eat more, sleep and repeat.  Regardless of my simplicity and the ordinary nature of my daily routine, life is certainly not mundane.  When you work with as many different personalities and characters as I do, and with the involvement of a plethora of emotions (my own and others), God tends to use the above to “mix things up.”  Every day, my God takes the simple and the ordinary to reveal to me His intricate and exciting plan for me and the world, which ultimately leads me to Him.  How?  Let me share with you how God has been challenging me to do this.
For my enjoyment, I have been reading “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer.  I highly recommend it.  Here is what Tozer says about God:
“God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.  In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality.  He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.  The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.”
God is near to us.  Not only is He the God of the Old and New Testament times, but He is God of the 21st century and is well, aware of the world we live in today.  If we are able to fathom the mystery that the God of the universe, who spoke life into being, calls Himself Emmanuel, God with us, we begin to understand that God is a person with personality and not only does He ordain and allow things to happen, He cares about the people that things happen to!
Our relationship with God is no different than any other relationship we have with the people around us.  God gently and powerfully invites us to pursue Him.  God in His perfection makes Himself available to us, reaches out to us first, and loves and delights in our pursuit of Him. If that would only be our response to His grace!  Even more, He brings us and uses the different physical places that we find ourselves, different situations and circumstances, and simple routines, that perhaps we would seek Him and know Him more (Acts 13).
“How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.  Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.  We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more to seek Him.”
Where are we in our pursuit of God?  Do we recognize that He took that first step through Jesus Christ in reconciling sinners to an amazing, personal relationship with Almighty God?  I pray that God would open our eyes to see how He uses the ordinary to draw us closer to an extraordinary God and that we would be driven to radically pursue our Awesome God.

From Pastor Keeyoung’s Heart
October 21, 2012