Welcome back to Next Door Gospel. I'm your host, Peggy Griffith. I'm so glad to be with you today, and I am so grateful that you're listening. I hope you're having a great spring and summertime. The temperature finally seems to be trending upward here in Milwaukee. Man, we love our summertime. Last year it happened on a Wednesday. Seriously though Milwaukee is home to some amazing music and ethnic festivals, street festivals, the Wisconsin State Fair, the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball, it's just an amazing time around here. Uh, anyway, I am looking forward to spending some time with you today and sharing some stories with you. I hope as you listen that you will recall some stories of your own that remind you of God. Showing up in moments of your life. So there's an age old hymn that graces the pages of nearly every Christian hymnal and at the small church where I was baptized, uh, pleasant Hill Christian Church in Butler, Kentucky. We sang the first verse of this hymn at the end of every worship service and at my current church, we sing this song often at the conclusion of church meetings and sometimes as a choral benediction at the end of worship, the song is called Blessed Be the, that Binds and Forgive my singing voice, but the lyrics. Of the first verse have been on my heart these past few weeks, and they go like this. Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian Love. The Fellowship of Minds is like to that above. So sorry to grace you with my singing voice, but I find that to be just such a simple and beautiful song. And so me being the inquisitive person who geeks out on stuff like this, I took to the old Google to learn more about the origins of this hymn, and I learned that it was written in the late 17 hundreds by a rural pastor in England by the name of John Faucet. He was a man who was orphaned at the age of 12, but he learned to read and ultimately became a preacher. And his little congregation was in a rural area called Wainsgate, and in some of the publications that I found, that small town is described as follows. The people were all farmers and shepherds poor as Job's Turkey. An uncouth lot whose speech one could hardly understand, unable to read or write. Most of them pagans cursed with vice and ignorance and wild tempers. The established church had never touched them. I mean, in that description alone, there is so much to relate to there as I think about it through today's lens. It sounds like Wainsgate was a poverty stricken, marginalized community that was mainly just ignored. And so the story goes that faucet engaged families in this community house to house, hand to hand, and he built a growing congregation there, and so much so that it got the attention of a much larger and prestigious parish in London. And they extended a call to him. At this point, it gets a little fuzzy on the specifics, but Faucet ultimately chose to stay with his small congregation, which was met with tears of joy from this community who loved him and his family so much. Now at that time in history, it was actually a common practice that ministers actually wrote hymns on the theme or topic of the sermon that would be sung during Worship. Faucet wrote that song for his congregation the following Sunday after he decided to stay with them, and he continued to serve and live with the people of Wainsgate for the rest of his life. And now 260 years later, blessed be the tie continues to connect people in communities of faith, identifying with the struggles of life and our unity together in Christ. So you might be asking now, Peggy, I know you like to rock out to more contemporary music. Why are you dwelling on this old hymn? Well, I'm finding these words, whether they are sung or spoken, to reflect a theme that has continued to stay top of mind for me in the past few weeks. So a few weeks ago I posted on Facebook and Instagram, one of my short music Monday reflection reels, and it was on Toby Mac's Song Help is on the Way. This came about on the heels of some devastating tornadoes that struck areas in the Midwest, uh, including some towns that I love very deeply in Kentucky. And my dear friend Patty, whom you have met on one of my, uh, earlier episodes was deployed as a Red Cross volunteer to the area. And as I reflected, I said to whoever was watching on the interwebs that day. When we look for God, it's often in prayer and we are conditioned to fix our eyes upward towards the skies. And when hard times come, such as a natural disaster, illness, grief, lost jobs, I said that while we might look up to find God and ask where God is in the midst of this story, don't forget to look around. Because when you look around, you'll see God's movement through the hands and feet of helpers, through the color pop of a dandelion growing through the pavement on the sidewalk, or through a serendipitous conversation with an old friend. And while I've been in this time of discernment and sharing this process with you through this podcast, I decided to challenge myself. To look around more, to be more present and more aware of God's movement within my own life. Man, what a fruitful past few weeks it has been. And I wanna share two specific stories with you today. The first story goes back 40 plus years. I kid you not, but social media is such a blessing in this area. I was born the youngest of three children. My brother is the middle child and has severe autism. And as a young child growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, and I know I'm dating myself here, but at that time there weren't a lot of advancements and options and working with his type of special needs. So when my brother became school age, my parents started to get nasty grams about needing to send him to school. But unfortunately, the school system in my small hometown simply did not have the means or programming to work with a 6-year-old, hyperactive, nonverbal, non potty trained little boy who had a spitting habit. And my parents fought a tough fight to get him the support and care he needed. And so what happened was the Board of Education purchased a big old station wagon and they hired a very kind woman named Diane to pick up several special needs children in our community and drive them the next county over to a school that could better accommodate their needs. Now Diane holds a very special place in my heart. She loved our brother and she loved our family at a time when there was just a lot of chaos in our household and she passed away a few years ago, and I mean it when I say the, that the world was made better by her presence here. I got to know a lot of these young children with whom my brother shared a seat in that station wagon. One young man named Matt was a beautiful soul, and he was completely blind, and he went to an elementary school in the next county. Now, Matt was a spunky young boy who never met a stranger, and he kept us in stitches with his jokes in his kindred heart. And I remember one day he asked my mom if he could see her face, so she bent down, took off her glasses and let him touch her face. After which he told her she was very pretty. And for a mama going through some of the toughest years of parenthood anybody could imagine, it was a pretty sacred moment for her to feel and be seen by a little blind boy at the time when she felt so lost in the chaos of everything. Na, as luck would have it, Matt and I connected over Facebook and a few weeks ago he mentioned that he was thinking of launching his own podcast and I immediately commented about Next Door Gospel and I said, I'd love to chat, help and collaborate in any way. So excited for this opportunity for him. Well, lo and behold, Matt not only took me up on it, but he remembered exactly who I was and who my brother is and my whole family. And we ended up having a wonderful phone conversation where I was overcome with how much some 40 years later he remembered of our experiences and while his first question was to ask how my brother was doing, his next comment was, this is awesome. I feel like I'm talking to family. Now I'll bet. We talked for a good half hour catching up on sharing stories, and we're planning to do some podcast collaboration, so stay tuned for that and you'll be glad to know that he is still the spunky, hilarious, and kindhearted human that I had always known him to be. God is so good. You see, when I hung up the phone, I was grinning from ear to ear. I couldn't wait to tell John all about it, and I was just in awe of how every little detail, experience, and action that we take in our lives and how it extends, this sacred string, the tie that binds us. And sometimes we get glimpses of that sacred tie and we get to tug on it and what we do with it, well. That's up to us. I reflected on growing up with this notion of God being this puppet master in the clouds, pulling and tugging on strings like we're all a bunch of marionettes. The everything that happens is God's will theory, I call it. But the aha moment struck me that God is not the puppet master. God's the string. God is the sacred tie that binds all things together. And when we take the time to look around and see the precious glimpses of that sacred tie, we are the ones that get to discern God's will and tug that tie. And when we tug it, we either put out love and positivity or we don't. 40 years ago, our friend Diane tugged on that tie and drove a carload of special needs children to places where they could learn in an environment better suited for the type of support they needed, and whether she understood it at the time or not, I don't know, but it fostered some memories and a connection that I am sincerely grateful for today. Now, the second story that I'm going to share with you actually goes back to my first episode of Nextdoor Gospel. Ugh, that sacred tie. But on the first weekend in May, a dear member of First Church Tosa passed away unexpectedly, and I have such great love for this person and her family, and the grief has been tough. And we got to celebrate her life in a memorial service a couple of weeks ago. And whenever I come across a person in some significant need of healing, I think about my friend Markey's sourdough bread that she baked for me last year in the midst of the fire of John's critical illness. And I call it healing bread. And while I really wanted to take a loaf of her bread to the family. But she was on vacation, traveling, um, that week and just having an epic time. So I thought, well, I'll wait until she's back home, has had some time to get settled in, and then I'll ask her if I can purchase a loaf of her bread for the family and take it to them later. Folks, I kid you not, the very morning of the memorial service, Markie posted online that she had two loaves of bread. She had just freshly baked. I swear she truly must have just gotten home, fed her starter and gone straight to baking, and you better believe I was checking in to get one of those loaves and Markie being the kindred mind that she is said, don't worry about paying me for the bread. I'm honored to do this for the family. The sacred tie that binds appeared again and Marky tugged on it and shared her wonderful, delicious and healing gift with a family who needed it. And friends. I wonder, 40 years from now, how will that very tie appear again for someone else to tug? I hope I'll be around. To witness it and friends it. It can be hard to see that sacred tie sometimes. Heck, probably most of the time. And the busyness of our lives, we go from one thing to another. We get to work some days and then wonder how we got there because we don't even remember driving. I'm raising my hand slowly here'cause I am guilty of that. And I am sure God shows me glimpses of the sacred tie so many times throughout a day, but I probably only notice a few. I get it. But can you imagine how this world would be if we all just tried to notice one sacred tie a day, one moment where we get to tug on that supernatural string and put some love out into the world. And it doesn't even need to be a grand gesture. Some of the smallest moments can make the greatest impact. What moments in your life stick with you to this day where you saw God's goodness show up for you? What connections and intersections have you made? All because someone tugged on the string and made a difference. What are some moments where you have been the one to tug on the string and put some good out into the world, and then when God has given you that glimpse that showed you the difference it made? Wow. I would love to hear about it. You can click the send an email link to this podcast or even send me an email at nextdoorgospel@gmail.com. And if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to help make that happen. And if you've enjoyed today's podcast, I'd appreciate it if you'd share it with a friend and follow this podcast wherever you listen to them. And you can also follow Nextdoor Gospel on Facebook and Instagram. And until we meet again, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Amen.