The best way to live is to consider each day an opportunity to create joy in someone's life. Sometimes that means giving items that another person will value or use. Nothing is more vacant than an unused book, previously read and appreciated, but simply filling up space. Book collections, like garden soil, need to be turned over to remain productive.
Giving someone time is very special, because time is far more valuable and volatile. It is here and gone, even when decades are involved. I feel honored when a neighbor needs a ride. I have needed rides to eye surgery appointments - four in all, two surgeries, two follow ups soon after - not the best time go solo. Lots of things go back and forth in a close neighborhood - food, gifts, flowers, rides, house-watching. I told a heart-patient, "Your garbage barrel days are over. I am taking over." He told me priceless stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The Gospel is the most important. I think it is good that the fossilized, overly-endowed, false-teaching piles of brick and marble are going away. I told one Lutheran, seminaries are so loaded with money and so lacking in students that they keep merging. Andover and Newton Seminaries (typical young Calvinists, old Unitarians) had to merge as Andover-Newton. They still got embarrassingly small, so they merged with Yale Divinity, which had already merged with the Episcopal Seminary nearby.
The Gospel is not found or kept in brick, mortar, marble, silver, brass, and gold. The spoken Word is the Gospel. Luther called the Church a mouth church and an ear church. The mouth must teach the truth of the Scriptures without additions or subtractions. That eliminates every parish and pastor using the NIV, ESV, RSV, NRSV, and other poor imitations of the Bible.
The Gospel Word heard is going to move around, in the family and community. The fruits of the Spirit are inevitable with the speaking and hearing of the Word. When Ranger Bob and I took Sassy out to the garden today, the green daffodil leaves were up everywhere - just the start. The bulb has to bloom. It is already a flower when planted. It only has to finish up to welcome spring and lift heavy hearts.
The daffodils are not only beautiful and varied, they are also easily cut and shared with others. And get this - the daffodils multiply on their own, so much that they have to be thinned.
Daffodils symbolize happens when the Gospel leaven is at work.
