As Mary grew older, especially...
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As Mary grew older, especially after her husband of 56 years had passed away, she found great joy in writing letters to the people she had known and loved down through the years of her life. She wrote in the morning, often completing several letters before breakfast. She always began the letters by remembering something special that she had shared with the person she was writing. She remembered birthday parties and Christmas celebrations, times of joy and times of sadness, graduations and travels, moments shared and not forgotten. Mary wrote so many letters that her friends began to wonder if she would run out of memories!
Like Mary, when Paul wrote his letters to the churches, he almost always began by remembering. To the church in Thessalonica he wrote that he remembered how in spite of persecution they received the word of God with joy, and how their suffering for the gospel made them imitators of Jesus. If you wrote to the people and churches you've known before, would you remember them as imitators of Jesus? Would someone writing you thirty years from now remember you as an imitator of Jesus? Do you remember people in your life who reminded you of the words and deeds of Jesus?
Like Mary, when Paul wrote his letters to the churches, he almost always began by remembering. To the church in Thessalonica he wrote that he remembered how in spite of persecution they received the word of God with joy, and how their suffering for the gospel made them imitators of Jesus. If you wrote to the people and churches you've known before, would you remember them as imitators of Jesus? Would someone writing you thirty years from now remember you as an imitator of Jesus? Do you remember people in your life who reminded you of the words and deeds of Jesus?
