Women of all ages are invited to Heart to Heart's latest Girls' Night Out on Tuesday, February 28. We'll meet at Machiavelli's at 6:00 p.m. for an evening of relaxed fellowship and good food. Bring your friends!

A nursery will be available at the church, and children will be given dinner. Please call the church office at 764-7176 by noon on Monday, February 27, to let us know the number of children you will be bringing. Pickup time is 8:30 p.m.

It's time to register for our annual Women's Retreat, to be held again this year at Blowing Rock Conference Center in the mountains of North Carolina. Join the women of FPC March 16-18 for a weekend of Bible-based sharing and exploring led by your faithful sisters in Christ. The planning committee has devised a schedule that allows group discussions as well as quiet time, and contemplation as well as outings. There will be time for fellowship and for shopping, hiking, or napping.

Flyers and registration forms can be found throughout the church, and scholarship assistance is available. We hope you will join us!

Our participation in the Fairmount Elementary School snack program continues to make a difference in the lives of children whose parents cannot afford to buy them an afternoon snack. Members of our congregation are now being asked to help the Neighborhood Initiatives Steering Committee stock up on vanilla wafers for these students.

Please bring your donated boxes of vanilla wafers in the Little Red House in the Fellowship Hallway. The committee will take them to the school, and the teachers will divide them into snack portions as needed.

Your loving contribution gives a boost in both energy and dignity to children from low-income families by allowing them to enjoy snacks with their classmates. Say a prayer of blessing as you send them on their way!

Out with the old, in with the new Tiger Cat.

Mowing season will get under way about this time next month: Sunday, March 25. We need more volunteers to join our dedicated mowing crew to perform this vital task. Here's your chance to zoom around the grounds on our brand-new Scag Tiger Cat! This professional-grade, zero-turn mower cuts nearly two hours off our old mowing time.

We are also looking for people to weed the planting beds around the building every few weeks, so that the property will remain attractive throughout a very busy wedding season.

And Tom Daniel would love to have help maintaining the beautiful gardens in the inner courtyard. It's not a one-person job!

If you can donate some of your time to help with any of these tasks, please contact Randy Cook at either npolecook@aol.com or 423-956-1541.

Higher Faith Clothes Closet, opening soon in the new Bristol Ministry Mall at 21 Washington St., urgently needs clothes hangers, plastic preferred. The Clothes Closet especially needs hangers with clips for slacks and skirts. Please leave your donated hangers in or near the grocery cart in the Fellowship Hallway. Thank you!

A startup mission onsite at FPC is looking for leaders and occasional volunteers. Our church's Neighborhood Initiatives Steering Committee is launching a Bible club for the children of the Bristol Boys & Girls Club, which meets each weekday in the children's wing. This outreach will include a brief Bible lesson supplemented by fellowship and activities, like an ongoing Vacation Bible School, and family gatherings a couple of times a year.

We need two coordinators to act as liaisons with the Boys & Girls Club staff and to schedule volunteers to teach the Bible classes and lead activities. We also need shepherds, one for each age group, to come to every session and befriend the children. We need Bible teachers and activity leaders as well; you could fill both roles, or only one, and as often as you want. To learn more about this important new outreach, contact Peggy Hill at 423-652-1732 or hillp@btes.tv.

Admittedly, the title of the book we are reviewing, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, gives little clue as to what it is about. And that calls for an explanation. You may remember its author, Lauren F. Winner, who was a speaker at the Bristol train station last fall in the Frederick Buechner lecture series at King College.

Winner is a native of Asheville, North Carolina, who grew up in a nonpracticing Jewish family. While an undergraduate at Columbia University, she converted to Orthodox Judaism and came to relish the rich ritualistic practices of her faith. Later, however, while studying for a master's degree at Cambridge in England, she felt the call of Christ. Returning to America for doctoral studies, she found her commitment to Christ becoming ever stronger, and she formally became a Christian. She then completed a masters of divinity at Duke University and is now teaching in Duke Divinity School. She has also been a visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. Her first book, Girl Meets God, which describes her pathway to Christ, is in our church library.

While doing research, Winner spent considerable time in Charlottesville, Virginia. One Sunday she met with friends at her favorite coffee shop, the Mudhouse, and realized that something was missing in her Christian life. She had been to church, so in one sense her spiritual obligations had been met, but she was idle, with no further responsibilities. And then it struck her: she missed the highly formalized and rich spiritual obligations of Orthodox Judaism. Protestant Christians spend an hour in church on Sunday morning, and that's it; they've done their thing! With all of the many obligations laid upon their faithful, Judaism does it better and expects more of its adherents.

In this book, Winner presents eleven Jewish practices that she thinks can transform the way Christians view the world and their God. She is not simply trying to make a fetish of observing a lot of complicated Jewish rituals. Hear it in her own words: "It is about paths to the God of Israel that both Jews and Christians travel. It is, to be blunt, about spiritual practices Jews do better. It is, to be blunter, about Christian practices that would be enriched, that would be thicker and more vibrant, if we took a few lessons from Judaism. It is ultimately about places where Christians have some things to learn."

And this is something that might prick the ears of Presbyterians. After all, some consider us the "frozen chosen," remembering that some of our Calvinistic forebears even refused to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps we need to be warmed to a more focused life of spiritual discipline that would provide a depth and richness to our spiritual life that we have not felt before. If you are curious as to what those eleven practices might be, they are right here in her book. Check it out and see what you think!