This Sunday, is Graduation Sunday. During the combined worship service (starting at 10:00), our celebration will focus on our high school graduates, but also noting those with college and advanced degrees. Along with acknowledging these accomplishments, we also will announce scholarship recipients. Following the service, there will be a reception in Asbury Hall with cupcakes and lemonade.
In our new series Renovate: Rebuilding with the Help of God, we enter the world of Nehemiah — an exile living comfortably in the Persian empire who cannot shake the knowledge that Jerusalem, the holy city of his people, still lies in ruins. His story is one of remarkable renovation, accomplished through his own determined effort and the unmistakable grace of God. But before the first stone is laid, something happens inside of him: a restlessness that won't quiet down, an ache that refuses to be explained away. Most people learn to ignore that feeling — to file it under "someone else's problem" and move on. But what if that inner disturbance isn't something to manage? What if the very places where your heart breaks are the places where your life's meaning is waiting to be discovered?
That question is at the heart of this series — and it's one that speaks directly to graduates stepping into an uncertain future and to anyone who has been waiting for permission to act on what they already know is broken around them. Nehemiah's story doesn't just trace one man's renovation project; it maps the interior journey that precedes every act of meaningful work in the world. Holy discontent — that sacred, unsettling urge that rises in the presence of ruin — is not a burden to carry. It is a compass. And for those willing to follow it honestly, through confession, courage, and radical dependence on God, it points toward the very place where God is already at work, waiting for willing hands to join God's mission.
Mike Frese