30 Days of Thanksgiving, Day 10

I'm switching over to the blog format for the remainder of this exercise.

30 Days of Thanksgiving, Day 10: this Thanksgiving project is growing on me, and I find that 30 days will not be enough. I intend to go through the rest of 2011, so it will end up as 61 Days of Thanksgiving. After that, I am contemplating 366 Days of Thanks in 2012.

Anyway, today I am thankful for the First Baptist Church in Newburgh Family, or the "First Family," as I like to call them. This family of people, numbering nearly 100 in all, is as important and as dear to me as my "family of origin" and my "in-laws", and in fact, there is often some crossover among my various family identities. My church family knows many of my family of origin members, and vice versa.

In a few cases, I have known some of my church family as their pastor since 1994, though most are far more recent in our acquaintance. This church family is marvelously diverse in age, in ethnicity, in culture and tradition, but we have found common ground in our shared faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and are steadily growing more and more into the picture of the Family of God, or the Body of Christ, as it is described in the New Testament.

The First Family just spent a month showing Appreciation to their Pastor and family, and it concluded with a great fellowship dinner last Saturday evening. Words of encouragement and affirmation, along with generous gifts of appreciation, were bestowed upon Kelly, our children, and me. All I could think of was the line by Jack Nicholson's character in the movie "As Good As It Gets": "...you make me want to be a better man." That's how I felt, and how I feel, about my church family. I am thankful every day that God sent me to First Baptist Church in Newburgh!