Senior Sunday Celebration!

Sunday April 29 we honored our high school graduating Seniors. Three of our wonderful youth will be graduating this May and beginning a new journey of their life. We spent part of the worship service listening to their stories and learning their next steps coming fall 2018.  Once the stories were shared parents were invited to come up and lay their hands upon their children.  We spent time as a congregation praying  this blessing over their lives:

This Day We Say Grateful

A Sending Blessing   It is a strange thing   to be so bound   and so released

all in the same moment,   to feel the heart   open wide   and wider still

even as it turns to take its leave.

On this day, let us say this is simply the way love moves

in its ceaseless spiraling, turning us toward one another, then sending us

into what waits for us with arms open wide to us in welcome  and in hope.

On this day, in this place where you have poured yourself out,

where you have been emptied

and filled and emptied again, may you be aware more than ever of what your heart has opened to  here,

what it has tended and welcomed here, where it has broken in love and in grief, where it has given and

received blessing in the unfathomable mystery that moves us, undoes us, and remakes us finally for joy.

This day may you know this joy in full measure.

This day may you know this blessing that gathers you in and sends you forth but will not forget you.

O hear us as this day we say grace; this day we say grateful; this day we say

 blessing; this day we release you in God’s keeping and hold you in gladness  and love.

 

After church all youth and their families were invited to a cook out hosted by a wonderful youth group family! We had a wonderful day celebrating our Seniors! They are loved greatly!