- Pastor Keith preached on 1 Corinithians 13 (the love chapter) and reminded us that love is a verb. He said that one way to love is to look at others and help them to become caring loving helpful people that dd to the vitality of God's church. He also reminded us that even though we may not necessarily like someone it's important to love them anyway.
- Pastor Keith reminded us of the following story:
On one of her visits to Nordstroms, a minister was on the top floor of the store looking at some of the finest dresses in the world, when the elevator doors opened and out stepped a very disheveled looking woman. Her clothes were dirty and torn, her hair was matted, her stockings were rolled down to her ankles. She just stood there holding a very full and very dirty gym bag in her hand and it was obvious that she probably wasn't going to buy anything—all the dresses were all in the multi thousand-dollar category.
The minister half-expected a security guard to come and show the woman out. But instead of a security guard, a stately saleswoman came over to the woman with the gym bag and asked, "May I help you, madam?"
The woman said, "Yeah! I wanna buy a dress!"
"Any particular kind of dress?" the saleswoman asked in a very kind and dignified manner.
"A party dress!" the woman answered.
"Well you've come to the right place," said the saleswoman. "Follow me. I think we have some of the finest party dresses in the world."
The saleswoman then spent more than fifteen minutes matching the dresses with the woman's skin color and eye color, trying to help her find just the right match. After selecting three dresses, the saleswoman said, "Shall we go and try them on?" They headed into the dressing room. The minister hurried into the adjoining dressing room and put her ear up to the wall. She had to hear what would happen next.
The woman with the gym bag tried on the dresses with the saleswoman's help. But then, after about ten minutes, the woman said very abruptly, "I've changed my mind. I'm not going to buy a dress today!" The minister in the adjoining cubicle held her breath and heard the saleswoman say, "That's all right." And then, in a gentle voice she said, "But here's my card. Should you come back to Nordstrom, I do hope that you'll ask for me. I would consider it such a privilege to wait on you again."
- Pastor Keith also told us about a study from John Hopkins University:
“More than 50 years ago at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a young sociology professor assigned his class to a city slum and asked them to interview 200 boys living there. On the basis of your finds, predict the future for these boys,” he said.
Shocked at what they found in the slums, the students estimated that 90% of the boys interviewed would some day serve time in prison. Twenty-five years passed. . . The same professor asked another class to try to locate the survivors of the 200 boys and compare what had happened. Of the 180 original boys still living, the students were surprised to discover that only four had ever been in jail.
Why had the predictions not turned out to be true? A common denominator was sought in their lives, some value or influence that may have made the difference, changed the equation.
Through more interviews, it was discovered that over 100 of the men remembered having the same high school teacher, a Miss O’Rourke, who had been a tremendous influence on them at the time.
After a long search. Sheila O’Rourke, now 70 years old, was found in a nursing home in Memphis, Tennessee. When told about the survey and asked for her explanation, she was puzzled. “All I can say,” she concluded, “is that I loved every one of them.”
- Pastor Keith challenged us all to remember the importance of love, and the above stories helped illustrate just how meaningful acts of love can be in the lives of others!
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