It's our summer's end edition of the EL Journal. Along with the following articles and videos, we wanted to let you know what's coming up in the next few months. Look for our new "Guidebook Edition" of More Life! Breaking Free...from the spirit of death which incorporates notes and prayers at the end of each chapter of Breaking Free... Also upcoming is the new booklet:

   More Hope! A Guide for Women Emerging... 

from the Shadow of Breast Cancer.

 

                                

More!

opportunities for healing

as ELM continues to grow. 

This Journal continues our focus on the various sessions from the Embracing Life Series: Taking Your Place in the Body of Christ. We hope you enjoy the articles and "Something to Say" section with Terence Apodaca.  

We are now posting on:     Follow us! 

In Gary's Words                                   

It was Saturday night. Time for 

"The Ingathering". 

Four times a year our Embracing Life group puts on a Saturday evening event we call The Ingathering.  Activities include: worship, teaching, a group prayer in which we all renounce attitudes, actions, and beliefs that lead to spiritual and emotional death, individual prayer ministry, communion, and sharing. 

One of the actions/attitudes that we always renounce is passivity. 

I renounced passivity.  Why not?  I was not being passive by sitting when everyone was standing.  I was just responding appropriately to my physical limitations, I thought, while everyone else was repeating a responsive prayer.

(You see, having Parkinson's makes it especially easy to be passive.  Standing up is hard.  Walking is hard work.  Talking is hard work.  Being understood is harder work. The difference between an appropriate response to decreased physical stamina/abilities and quitting... giving up... being passive... is not a double yellow line on black asphalt.  It is a moving squiggle.   It is grey on grey.  It is a sequence of dots, dashes and segments painted on a dirt road with the wind blowing.)

But...

This morning... I got busted.

It was not a mean-spirited arrest.  Rather, it was more akin to the help of a friend who sees you make a wrong turn and goes out of his way to follow you, emergency lights flashing, to a wide spot where there is room to turn around. 

The friend was not a person.  It was God. 

The lights were His love.

The road was Passivity Highway.

He asked me if I could just go around and lay hands on people and pray silently during the individual ministry/prayer time.  (Note: A couple weeks prior I had received prayer myself which encouraged me to do just that, lay hands on people.  No need to talk.)  This morning I was reminded that standing up and laying hands on people would actively get me involved in the ministry time and would be life giving to me. 

I would be renouncing passivity not just in word, but in deed.

I would be truly embracing life.                                                                

 �Nov 2011