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Mission Opportunity Right in Our Backyard

Immediate Need: Housing for an Afghan Refugee Family

Sometimes we go out into the world to do missions. Sometimes the world comes to us. If all the pieces fall into place, OHC could be the hands and feet of Jesus for an Afghan refugee family right here at home. Lutheran Community Services Northwest is helping stabilize hundreds of Afghans who fled their home country by providing at least 2 to 3 months of support. Churches and other groups can walk alongside refugees by helping with transportation, tutoring, cultural orientation, household furnishings and the gift of time. The first piece that must fall into place is housing. What's needed, short-term: a host home or ...

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Missions Update - Krafts Jungle Adventure

Have you read the latest news from the Kraft family? For those who are newer to our church family, the Krafts and GO Missions in Peru are one of our major mission partners we support. Based in Chiclayo, the attached tells of their recent jaunt into the jungle. Good stuff for us to be praying with them on in the coming year. Please click the download link below.

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Rona Reflections

In the last few weeks, the world has been in a spin. Everyone around the world has been, and still to this day, focused on the virus Convid-19. If you are anything like me, you are ready for all this to be done. You are ready for things to go back to normal, where you can interact with people like you would normally do. For the extroverts, you will be able to go out and gain energy from the people around you, and for the introverts, you can get your extroverted family members off your back trying to hang out with you every chance they have. For the workers without a job right now, you are ready to go back to work and do what you ...

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The Perfect Easter Flower

In the forests of the Pacific Northwest, among the ferns and huckleberry bushes, one can occasionally  encounter a wildflower, Trillium ovatum, that I consider to be the perfect flower for Easter. It is usually solitary and very fragile. It blooms about Easter time and must be shared. If it is plucked and taken home for one’s own pleasure, the plant will die, never to flower again. It has three leaves and three petals representing the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Initially the flower is white representing purity, the perfect sacrificial lamb, but then the petals turn to a deep purple, the color of the royal robes of a ...

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Seven Things I Tell Myself Every Morning

Some time ago when I was in college I finally got tired of learning the same spiritual truths over and over again only to forget those lessons and have to relearn them (usually the hard way). Then one day in my college apartment it occurred to me that we had this amazing new technology called writing and that I could actually write down and recall to mind on a daily basis some of these key truths.  Over the next several years I added to my personal “top truths” list until I landed on seven that would be foundational for me over the next 20 years. (Actually there were eight, but seven was a more spiritual ...

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Are You Desiring Too Little?

Matt 19:29: And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. The call to live the Christian life is a call to follow Christ. It’s a call to take up ones cross as he did and to surrender to the will of the Father. It’s a call to a life of total obedience. And yet connected to this call to live the Christian life is something that we sometimes miss - an appeal to desire. It’s not an appeal to earthly desire, but rather to a desire for something greater than anything ...

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The Friendship and the Fear

Recording artist Matt Redman's 1997 album was entitled The Friendship and the Fear. The phrase is a profound one and contains within it one of the keys to living the Christian life. The concept of friendship with God is central to us as believers. In 1 John 3:1 we read, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” Jesus said to his disciples, “I have called you friends, for everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). And Paul prays, “…that love may be the ground into which you sink your roots and on which you ...

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