PRISM

Rev. Dr. Steve Stone | sstone@germantownumc.org

Rev. Mimi White | mwhite@germantownumc.org

Spring is here at last! We made it through a long cold, winter and the sun has finally returned. Prism is celebrating with a super-fun seven-week sermon series called “The Animated Gospel.” Every week we focus on lessons learned in the Pixar and Disney movies (such as Brave, The Good Dinosaur, Sea Beast, and Zootopia) with the corresponding scripture for each one. Bring your kids, your grandparents, your friends, and neighbors, and come worship with us in your blue jeans or even white pants – no one’s keeping track of when it’s the right time to start wearing white. We don’t care if you show up in your yard clothes - just come on over!

Now that the sun has returned, I am planting seedlings, dragging out my hanging flower baskets, and getting out the Osmocote fertilizer to feed the roses. My most prized one is my 14-foot-tall hybrid tea rose “Mr. Lincoln.” It survived another winter without a pine branch falling on it and it’s aiming for the world record (the record is 18 feet.) How, you might ask, did your rose grow so tall? All I can say is location, love, and 14 years of good luck.

Have you begun to garden at all yet? It can be very therapeutic. Not only is it great exercise, gardens have so many metaphors for us to use in life – like weeding (for times we need to pluck out the distractions keeping us from producing at our best (reducing social media & TV time); or like pruning (for the times we need to let go of things that are dragging us down (donating extra clothes and household goods to the Salvation Army, or letting go of an old habit.) Whenever we think about it, we can find a cool garden metaphor that applies to living – poets have been doing this for centuries.

My favorite one for this season is “fertilizing,” feeding plants the right nutrients so they can bloom and thrive all summer long. How am I feeding my soul so it can do the same? Our founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, gave us a wonderful list of such things and called them “The Means of Grace.”

Here are five on the list for feeding and nurturing your soul: Prayer (Private and in public with others), searching Scripture, receiving the Lord's Supper, fasting, and Christian conferencing (fellowship) –basically checking in with others asking, “How is it with your soul?”

As we do our spring cleaning, gardening, and start making our plans to venture back out into the Great Outdoors, let’s not forget to take the time to spring clean, weed, prune, and fertilize our own souls. Take ten minutes in the morning to read a scripture and reflect upon it; take five minutes in the afternoon to pray and thank God for all that’s going right that day; and set up a time each week to meet friends for coffee or lunch to check in with each other and ask for help if we need it. We can worship and take communion together every Sunday and that’s helpful for sure, but if we start intentionally taking time every day to feed our souls in these little ways, we too can experience beautiful growth and thrive like the flowers all around us this season. Happy gardening, and happy Spring!

“Money is the root of all evil,” is an often misstated verse in the Bible. The accurate quote of that particular verse is “The love of money is the root of all evil.” God calls us to give freely as he has given to us so that money will not possess us and become a barrier to our relationship with him. Let us show our love for the Lord as we present our tithes and offerings.

(Fruit for Celebrating the Offering by Melvin and James Amerson)

Finance