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"Front Porch and Beyond"

with Missionary/Mom Beth Guckenberger

Questions to prod your personal thinking and processing or for use in group discussion and are arranged by article title.

“Influence”

1. Dale Hanson Bourke writes about hearing her pastor say, “You go nowhere by accident.” God has a purpose for you. Wherever you are, be used by him.” How is, or can, God use you in your current circumstances?

2. Think of a time when you had to enter a room where you knew very few people or no one at all. How would it have changed things for you if you had asked, “Lord, show me my purpose here,” like Dale did?

3. How do you define influence? Has this definition changed from when you were younger? If so, how so?

4. How have your grandparents influenced you? Are any like Dale’s Grandmother? And if so, what have you learned from them?

5. Dale also writes, “It is when we try to grasp at influence that we end up ensnared and dissatisfied.” Have you found this to be true? How so?

6. What’s an idea generated by this article that you’d like to think more about?

“Letting Go of Normal”

1. Jennie Allen defined “normal” as “a mortgage and health insurance and a safe house with a cute nursery.” How do you define “normal”?

2. Have you ever rebelled against “normal?” What did your rebellion look like and how did it affect you?

3. How would you answer Jennie’s question, “What if the things I thought he wanted for me at this stage of my life were the very things keeping me from him?”

4. Jennie asks, “What is the one thing you are afraid to give God?” Why did you answer this way?

5. How could you begin to release your hold on the one thing you are afraid to give to God in the coming weeks and months?

6. How might letting go change you?

"Where Have You Received It?"

with Pastor Yvonne McCoy

Each issue of FullFill contains surprise tidbits ranging from ideas for organization, trend tips, recipes, little-known facts to who knows what!

Bonus

A Future Not Our Own

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

From Xavarian Missionaries:

Oscar A. Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, in El Salvador, was assassinated on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass in a small chapel in a cancer hospital where he lived. He had always been close to his people, preached a prophetic gospel, denouncing the injustice in his country and supporting the development of popular and mass organizations. He became the voice of the Salvadoran people when all other channels of expression had been crushed by the repression.

This prayer was composed by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, drafted for a homily by Card. John Dearden in Nov. 1979 for a celebration of departed priests. As a reflection on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Bishop Romero, Bishop Untener included it in a reflection titled "The mystery of the Romero Prayer." The mystery is that the words of the prayer are attributed to Oscar Romero, but they were never spoken by him.