Set your clocks AHEAD one hour,
Saturday, March 12th!
Daylight Savings Time Resumes

GLORIA DEI NEWS

Our MEALS ON WHEELS date for March is Thursday, the 10th.  If you would like to be a part of this ministry, please call Shelly Lausche at 651-631-9040 for all the information!

KOA/50+  Thursday, March 17th at 12 noon! Theme:  “All Things Green” A corned beef lunch will be served.  Tickets are $5 and will be sold March 6th and 13th, or call Verlayne.  Anyone 50 and over is invited!

EPIC continues to collect cans for missions.  We are sending the proceeds to the Jake Gillard family who is serving in Uganda.  If you would like to converse with the Gillards, their address, along with birthdays and anniversary, is below.

Mailing address for letters:

Rev. Jacob Gillard
c/o  Lutheran Media Ministry Ugand
P. O. Box 21645     Kampala, Uganda , Africa

Birthday: Jacob - June 26, Michelle - Jan. 24 Amelia - Feb. 9; Evangeline - Sept. 5
Wedding Anniversary: June 5

Attention Thrivent members!!
Thrivent Choice "Choice Dollars" is a program to give Thrivent funds to organizations, Including Gloria Dei. There is money set aide for each Thrivent insurance customer. It is strictly Thrivent dollars and has no effect on the insurance holders finances or their tax itemized deductions.

The money is given when a Thrivent member (including non-members of Gloria Dei), calls 1-800-847-4836  asks for "Thrivent Choice" dials 0 to get a customer service person, asks to give their "Choice Dollars" to Gloria Dei Lutheran Church at 3014 NE McKinley. The money is direct-deposited from Thrivent to Gloria Dei's bank account. The money is available each quarter and not available after the quarter ends. If this request is not made by March 31, this quarter's money is gone.  Any questions, call Karmon Christopherson at 612-789-0003.

Thanks be to God and to all of you for a wonderful 60th Anniversary Celebration especially all of you who participated in preparing food, setup and cleanup and making the fellowship hall look so new!!   We had 80 participants in church and 60 diners at the brunch that followed.  We enjoyed worshipping, fellowshipping, and reliving memories of our church’s history. As Miss Informed always says “To God be the glory”

March 13: Our Fellowship Sunday this month is March 13th.  The Board of Trustees will be hosting.

March 19-21: Lutheran Marriage Encounter Don’t forget about the upcoming Lutheran Marriage Encounter weekend, March 19-21 in Brooklyn Center. For more info visit www.godlovesmarriage.org

March 20: Don’t Dump on NorthEast - DDONE Join us for a fundraiser to keep a hazardous waste transfer facility out of our NE neighborhood.  We will meet at  Gasthof Zur Gemutichkeit for a huge all-you-can-eat buffet on Sunday, March 20, at 4 pm.  Silent auction, drawings and other door prizes. $25 tickets in advance by March 11th. Call Sandi at 612-706-0651.

March 24: ANNUAL SPRING KITCHEN AND DINING ROOM CLEANING, Thursday, March 24th at 9:00 a.m. Put on your scrubbing clothes.  The more hands, the faster the project will go. Please bring your own rubber gloves, rags and buckets; we’ll purchase the cleaning supplies.  We’ll keep a coffee pot on.  Let’s make it a party! WE REALLY NEED YOUR HELP!

April 16: Mark your calendars for the “SPRING FLING”Saturday, April 16th, 7:00 pm. “The Kingery Family, will be our entertainment. Refreshments and program is $6.50, children 12 years old and under $3.00.  Advance sales only.  Tickets will be on sale March 20 thru April 10 in the Narthex at church.

May 7: Save the Date – Saturday, May 7th, “Lemons to Lemonade” Salad/Quilt Auction Redemption Lutheran, Bloomington Fund Raiser for Trinity First Lutheran School.

MARCH IS MINNESOTA FOOD SHARE MONTH – PLEASE REMEMBER FOOD FOR THE SALVATION ARMY
We have been delivering foods from our grocery cart monthly, but due to the economy there is big need to continue this effort.  Things that are needed are canned fruits, soups and vegetables, canned beans, spaghetti sauce and noodles, macaroni and cheese, crackers, peanut butter, jelly, cereal, etc.  Please remember those less fortunate.  If you would rather, you could send a monetary donation to them.  Thank you!

A WORD FROM OUR PASTOR

What is Lent?

We don't know much about how the first-century Christians treated the forty days before Resurrection Sunday. The Bible itself mentions nothing about it. But by the second century, the church was starting to use that season as a time for training new believers about how to rightly think, live, and believe as Christians. This was done, in part, by reliving the Scriptural accounts of Christ's final time before He was killed. It was done with the whole church community as they, too, relived it, and fasted together. The end of the training period was Holy Week, and Easter would be the day that the new believers would be baptized into the Church.

As the Roman world became more Christian, people who had already been baptized as children, began to shift the meaning of the season to become a time for looking at the depth of one's own sin, and turning away from them. Ephraim the Syrian (ca. 306–373), a prolific hymnographer and theologian of the 4th century has given us this Lenten prayer as evidence: “O Lord and Master of my life, grant me not a spirit of idleness, curiosity, lust for power, and idle talk.”  

So gradually, Lent became a time for learning what it means to follow Christ, and to listen to the Spirit. A time for actually going about changing one's ways to be more as Christ would have them be. Many people turned their gaze toward Good Friday and asked themselves, 'How dare I force someone who loves me this much to go through something this awful?' They saw the Cross and asked, 'Lord, what can I do to stop doing this to You? How can I love you better?'  Many times in the Gospels, Jesus called on people to repent, to turn away from doing evil. So the first impulse of love is to try to do things that Jesus would want of you.

But we all know that this impulse of love goes the way of our New Year resolution. We fail, as we always do. One of the things we learn in Lent is how inescapable our sin is, how far we are from being complete, how fallen we are in our relationship with God, how divided we our from God. When we struggle like mad to give some tiny aspect of our lives over to God, we discover how maddeningly out of reach a whole life of godliness is. We can't do anything to fix our relationship with God. 

No matter how passionately we might want not to be the cause of Jesus' suffering, we end up driving another nail into Jesus, making Him carry an even bigger burden. (Now, picture us or yourself at our less passionate moments...) Even when I'm at my best, I'm still enough… by myself, to execute the God who loves me.  But then, that's why He did what He did, something only He could do. All we can do is collapse at Jesus' feet.  Take His love at His word and trust Him. We cannot get there from here, but He can. He will take us, and the Holy Spirit will lead us along that road. Through the Spirit, we can love God better. The Bible tells us much of what we need to know, and other believers (also led by the Spirit) can also help. Christ gives us His body and His blood (Holy Communion), His presence among us and with us and in us.  Knowing that, we can stand ready for Holy Week.

Lent is the season for the experience of giving your life over – in each moment, bodily, deliberately, to Christ and to what the Spirit is showing you. God wants you to surrender yourself, and let the Spirit work in you. So during these forty days that begins on March 9th with Ash Wednesday, we take responsibility for our acts and thoughts, and treat them as the killers they are.

Lent is self-discovery of the parts of ourselves we don't want to discover, through prayer, fasting, and other disciplines. It is the opening up, the turning over to God, the repenting of our sins, the turning away from that which does not please God. Yet there is just a glimpse of Easter through the heavy clouds of Good Friday -- that Christ has taken the burden, and you don't have to carry it anymore. So will you come to the altar on Ash Wednesday to worship God and begin an intentional time of reflection to ponder the question ‘what more can I do to glorify God in my life?’  God is waiting and God is calling.  Are you listening?  Are you responding?

WE CARE SO WE SHARE

Dear Church Family,

“Will you have a column for Jeannie this month?” inquired Pastor.  How quickly the days have passed since the deadline for the last newsletter.  Of course, February is our short month, having three less days than January.  During those three days, I would have had 259,200 more seconds than I would have had in February. Reading an article in a recent senior publication (what else?), I learned a lot about the value of time.  “To a student who failed a grade - the value of one year.  To a mother who had given birth to a premature baby - the value of one month.  To a pastor with a sermon to prepare, or a newspaper editor with a publication deadline - the value of one week.  To lovers, waiting to meet - the value of one hour.  To a commuter, who just missed his train - the value of one minute.  Ask someone who just avoided an accident, - the value of a second.  To a person who had won an Olympic silver medal - the value of a millisecond.”  Remember time waits for no one.  Read Psalm 39:4, “Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be.  Remind me that my days are numbered— how fleeting my life is.” Treasure every moment that you have.  The article further said, “Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  Today is a gift and that is why it is called a present.”  Unwrap your present.  May each of your seconds be special.

How often have we heard “Our days are numbered”?  Our Evelyn Nyberg’s past many months were lengthy days of waiting, as she waited for her Heavenly Father to call her number, and take her home to Him, to be free from the earthly pains of unhealing incision sites, infections and the loneliness of multiple hospital and care center stays. She longed for her call, so she might join her loved ones.  The call came and Pastor Gade officiated at Evelyn’s divine service of victory on February 3rd.  Karmon and Angela musically enhanced Evelyn’s service.  We, the church family extend our Christian love to her family. We will remember Evelyn as courageous, loving, cheerful, who with her sister, Polly, always showed up for our little blue envelope mailings, showed up with mighty scrumptious treats, a pretty lady with a glowing inner beauty.

KOA is now in the very capable leadership of Verlayne. What a well planned, fun, love meeting we enjoyed in February.  Our octogenarian plus birthday celebrant, Millie Eckhardt, retrieved her mom’s yummy pineapple cake recipe, from the back of her recipe box and treated us, most of all not being able to resist “just a small second helping.”  It kept Arlene hopping, distributing those “small” ??? seconds. Please help Verlayne in an assortment of ways. (1) sign up for a month of hosting (treats); (2) provide some inexpensive items that could be use for door prizes; (3) make suggestions for themes for meetings; (4) bring in some KOA appropriate funny stories and jokes.  Many brought wedding pictures for the February meeting.  What a bunch of lovely brides we had.  Many of these weddings took place more than half a century ago.  Stories were shared of wonderful husbands, no longer with earthly presence, but still holding spaces in the hearts of their brides. We were still blessed with having present at our meeting table, three grooms, Pastor, Don and Barney. Still in good standing (most of the time). Ironically, the styling that their barbers now deal with, have undergone some of the radical changes that the beauticians of the ladies have had to work with.  Puff it, stretch it, volumize it.  Most of us remember doing without until you could pay cash for it.  Memories emphasized LOVE.  Our oldest present member, Pearl, was still able to tell a joke, without blowing the punchline!!  We seldom get to completely complete a planned program as all of us have memories to share.  Come join us and share yours.

We have a writer among us, one who writes words as well as the many numbers she writes for Gloria Dei each month.  Her article as that of many good authors, provides an object lesson, with a heroine, partially fictional and yet you realize the author is indeed writing about someone he/she knows very well.  As I read the article of the dream of a young girl, wanting and willing to wait for an invitation to audition for the adult choir, I wondered how many past/present choir directors at Gloria Dei would have delighted in the persistence of this young girl.  Karmon and Meridel were questioned as to directors they would have remembered and they came up with Briley, Bahr, Kersten, Cole, Sather, Brueske, Messerschmidt, Stahl and of course, our Angie (and would you believe her little guy is now three years old?)  We wonder how encouraged any or all of these would have been to have a young/old girl/boy patiently standing and waiting for an invitation to audition for the choir. The author of the article concludes “this was the first victory of many for her.  It was not the biggest, or the hardest fought – but it was the first.”

From your reporter:  Are you standing in the background waiting for someone to ask you to sing in the choir?  Be on a board?  Decorate the altar? Teach Sunday School? Be a financial reporter or counter? Help with maintenance? Be a friend?  Let your voice be ready to audition.  I am aware that the heroine in the article found her adult choir gifted singing voice, due to illness, no longer present.  She learned if the octaves change for you, life has other auditions for you.

In closing, last month we talked about the importance of names, how often we compare someone to a church family member at Gloria Dei.  This has been especially true in our recent move where many of us have trouble remembering names.  At a recent “getting to know your neighbor gathering” canines were discussed, including Sadie (the Gade pooch) whose name is recalled with more frequency as a pastoral visitor, rather than Pastors!  At the same gathering many discussed pets we had in our homes.  Our turn: “We had my sweetie’s pet squirrels – no dog, but our Wyoming kids raise enough dogs for the whole family.”  Question, “What kind of dogs do they raise?” Answer: He: “What is it?”  She: “They are Pomerenkes”*  Miss Informed extends her octogenarian apologies to Russ, and to the rest of you, please forgive and forget the many blurbs, or burps in this column.

To God be the glory!
Miss Informed