vis-a-vis

  O Little Town of Bethlehem [Edited excerpt from the “Christmas in October” post by Teresa Albright on her 2016 travel blog A Tree Grows in Jerusalem .]   …The next morning our Biblical Formation group climbed onto a tour bus for our final excursion outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. We headed to Bethlehem, a small town just five miles from Jerusalem, but outside Israel. We were entering Palestinian territory and the disputed West Bank. With passports in hand, it seemed we never left Jerusalem. The suburbs of Israeli settlements filled in any gaps of land separating the two states. I thought about a common Mexican-American expression uttered by those whose families lived in Texas since before it was a U.S. state. "We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Staring out the bus window, I wondered… “how many of the construction workers building these settlements are Palestinian?” I also wondered about those Israeli “settlers” – perhaps not unlike so many settle

  A FAITH-FILLED ADVENT by Megan Burdolski, Director of Stewardship   The second week of Advent is halfway through. As I’ve spent quite a bit of time with my father in the house where I grew up these past weeks, I’ve found myself looking through photo albums and reminiscing about my childhood. I have come across so many things that remind me of our church and the faith my father instilled in my sister and me from a very young age. As young children, my dad read stories to us from a very thick children’s Bible every Saturday evening. We were taught several prayers of the rhyming variety which we took turns reciting before meals and at bedtime. My dad also set a quiet example as we would wake up on weekend mornings and find him sitting in his chair reading his Bible or visibly in prayer. Later on Saturday evenings, we could find him poring over his Sunday school materials preparing the lesson he was going to teach his adult “Willing Workers” class the next day. [Side note: All of th