Are You Ready?

As Mary & I reflected over 2008 and think of all the lives that have been impacted by your hard work, these are the thoughts we adapted from Ephesians 3, The Message.

This is our life work: helping people understand and respond to the Good News. It came as a sheer gift to us, a real surprise, God handling all the details. So here we are, telling things that are way over our heads, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ.

Our task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along for 2000 years. Then Jesus came, He died, He arose, He ascended, and now He's coming back! Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels!

Mary & I get down on our knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. We ask him to strengthen all our CR family by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in us as we open the door and invite him in everyday of our lives.

With our feet planted firmly on love, we'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. We will reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God in 2009.

God can do anything, you know—far more than you can ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

The CR wave is building!
Hang on for the ride of your life!

Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all 2009!

Peace for the New Year,

Mac & Mary