Hello Friends! Hope finals are going well. We have one more day of FREE LUNCH! Come by tomorrow from 11am till 1pm (or after). We will be having lasagna and ziti. And we have a fantastic road trip on Friday.
Be sure and show up on Friday at 4pm at the Wesley for our annual Opryland Road Trip. We will go to Opry Mills to shop and eat. And then about 7:30pm or 8pm we will walk over to see the lights at Opryland Hotel. After we finish there we will head over to the Cheesecake Factory for desert. Yay!
Now For “Sami’s Ramblings About Jesus”
One of the movies we watch at my house pretty constantly is “Cars.” It is the story of a hotshot race car that gets lost in a small town and learns the value of slowing down and appreciating life, as well as those around him. In the beginning of the movie through an unfortunate series of events “Lightning McQueen” finds himself in the courtroom of Radiator Springs. He has just demolished the only road in town and the locals are angry. The town attorney makes an impassioned plea to the judge to make Lightning fix the road “because we are a town worth fixing!” she says.
I heard that line just recently. (“Cars” was on, again. Isaiah has to watch it at least once a day.) Something about it hit me in a fresh way. Like the affirmations of faith we recited in church when I was a child, the words sounded almost holy: definitely an affirmation, definitely words of faith. “We are a town worth fixing.” It made me think of the words from John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten son, so that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God’s attitude towards the world is that we are world worth saving. Our lives are worth redeeming. Our heartache is worth healing. Our emptiness is worth filling. Our human-ness is worth loving. We are people worth loving.
That thought just fills me up. It staggers me that this is what God thinks of all of us, that we are worth loving, no matter the cost, no matter the inconvenience, no matter the difficulty that such a labor demands. It is worth it to Him to love us, and to show that love in no uncertain terms. Kind of like the ad that says, “when you care enough to send the very best.” That’s who God is. That’s what God does. God sends us Jesus.
A few years ago someone recorded a Christmas song called “
I believe that in love God is constantly looking for ways to reveal His presence to us. This morning as I drove to the Wesley Foundation I found myself behind a yellow school bus. There were children in the back waving excitedly to the cars behind them. I saw them and waved back. They were so excited! It was as if something wonderful had happened for them in that moment. Really I was thinking something wonderful had happened to me. I had just been thinking of how God is so good and always looking for ways to show up in our lives. It was as if He chose that moment to catch my attention through the exuberance of childhood and say, “See, I am here. This is me waving at you.” And something deep within me echoed a holy affirmation, “we are a world worth saving; I am a woman worth loving.”
I hope you see God wave at you today. I hope you have holy moments of pondering a line from your favorite movie and experience it as God’s grace speaking to your heart. I hope the baby Jesus becomes so real to you this Christmas season that you experience the power of God’s love reaching out to you in strange and wonderful ways. No matter who you are or where you are, God is crazy about you. You are loved. Merry Christmas!
This is me trusting,
Sami
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Sami Wilson
Campus Minister/Director
WKU Wesley Foundation
United Methodist Campus Ministry
270-842-2880
sami.wilson@wku.edu
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