What are your favorite memories of meaningful conversations with your dad…together, as a family?  Mine usually revolved around food—the breakfast, lunch or dinner table.

When is your favorite time to have meaningful conversations with your heavenly Father, when brothers and sisters in Christ are with you? 

My favorite time to pray with my family is around the table—breakfast, lunch or dinner.  I’m not talking about those little arrow prayers of thanks given before we all eagerly dive into the food before us.  I’m talking about…

• Saturday morning breakfasts—when we have no pressing plans, no schedule we must keep, no clock to which we must march. So we take turns praying for each other and life’s challenges before we scatter to our separate Saturday fun.
• Sunday lunches—after God has spoken to us about something in church and when we’ve had time to hear the joys, the burdens and the hearts of each other over a leisurely meal.
• That occasional dinnertime—when a free evening stretches before us and something in the activities that day or the conversation that night or the devotional we just read moves us to pray…together.

This Sunday we’ll be sharing two meals together—the Lord’s Table and the picnic table.  The first is at 10:00 a.m. at Mosaic; the second is at 12:00 p.m. at Liberty Park.  While I don’t know how much praying we’ll be doing together at the picnic, I know we’ll be doing a lot of it at the Lord’s Table. 

We’ve been studying “Praying with Jesus” now for over a month as we’ve looked at some of our Lord’s prayers which he used to mentor his disciples (and us) in prayer.  So we thought it would be helpful, useful and appropriate to actually DO some praying together…at the Table…with the Lord Jesus…this Sunday.  We’ll have lots of music to worship with and Scripture to listen to…and, hopefully, blessings to celebrate…together!

Here’s how you can prepare for this Sunday’s “mealtime prayer”:

• Give some thought to the ways you have seen God answering prayer of late…and come ready to share about that around the Lord’s Table.
• Give some thought to how you have sensed prayer changing YOU of late…and come humble enough to share that with your Family.
• Give some thought to the prayers yet unanswered…and come willing to let others bear that burden with you.

And ONE MORE THING: starting this month (June), we will be taking a special offering…actually a 2^nd offering…on the 1^st Sunday of every month that will be dedicated to the basic needs of our body of believers. We’re calling it our “Benevolent Offering” because it is going to be used exclusively to bless those in need at Mosaic.  

I’m asking you to ask God what he would have you do this month to help others in our spiritual family meet the sometimes crushing needs they have due to illness or medical bills or loss of their job or breakdown of their transportation.  Then just do what God nudges you to do and rejoice in the joy of bearing one another’s burdens, thus fulfilling the law of love of our Lord Jesus (Galatians 6:2). 

See you at the table,

Pastor John