First Christian Church
Good News

"Good News" is a devotional written by the members, staff, and friends of

It is the season of cultivation.  The ground has been slow to thaw in our central Iowa community because of a stubbornly persistent winter and a surprising freeze or two after a few deceptive warming trends.  By now, however, winter feels officially consigned to memory, and the hand trowels beckon.  Every commercial parking lot seems to sprouted garden center tents filled with flats of colorful options, and bags of the horticultural equivalent of snake oil -- a loamy elixir sure to nourish and cure whatever ails the garden.  There is, within all the choosing and the digging and the fertilizing and the watering, an aliveness that finds us breathing more deeply, smiling a bit more broadly, and perhaps feeling -- even if ever so slightly -- a little more sensitively.  As I say, alive.

Some of that impulse may be purely natural -- our human sap, so to speak, beginning to flow more freely.  For Christians, however, I am inclined to view if more deeply -- as perhaps the natural outgrowth of the spiritual spade work accomplished during Lent, and the shove into living experienced at Easter.  We haven't, after all, simply been promised an eternity; we have been called into life. 

The season after Pentecost -- that power-filling day when the Holy Spirit filled and transformed a band of feckless followers into compelling witnesses and, in so doing, gave birth to the church -- opens out for the spiritual descendants of those witnesses with the invitation to consider and explore how it is that the Good News is cultivated and brought to flower in our own time and place.  Part of that work no doubt includes the ongoing cultivation of ourselves through prayer and study, worship and fellowship, thanksgiving and service -- just a few of those practices that keep the soil of our souls moist and fertile. 

There are, after all, good things to grow...good news to share...good life to live.  Spirited, alive, and good.

Tim Diebel
Senior Minister

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