Study after study shows there’s no practice more effective at increasing your happiness and well being than practicing radical gratitude. While practicing gratitude is key to increasing our happiness, we often forget to do it especially during the Christmas season. In this series, we will look at practising gratitude so that we can slow down and appreciate the many gifts God has given us.

Surrender is a word that has many negative connotations.  Songs and sayings that tell us to never surrender resonate deeply with us.  However, when it comes to the Christian faith, surrender is absolutely necessary.  We surrender to God who is in all ways more powerful and stronger than us.  We surrender our ways for his ways.  
       The stories we will look at through this series show how people in Scripture are faced with challenges to surrender something or surrender their ideas and trust in God.  Jesus doesn’t challenge them to give up their desires but to surrender how they are going to fulfill those desires.  Jesus doesn’t criticize them for the desire, but redirects them.  He challenges them to trust in his ways and truly discover what they want. 
       In this homily series we will look at the surprising truth that we often have to surrender to win.  We surrender something of smaller value to get something even greater.  God takes full responsibility for the life fully surrendered to him. 

We struggle with having enough or being enough.  We wonder if we have done enough at work.  We wonder if we have invested in our kids enough to set them up for success.  We wonder if we will have enough money for retirement and our futures.  We live with a sense that we are not doing enough but not sure what enough is.  We just live with this vague sense that we don’t have enough and are not doing enough or are good enough.  Is there a way to be content and satisfied?  Is there a way to know we have done enough and so we can rest? 
In this homily series we will look at knowing when enough is enough.  We will look at how enough is the wrong goal.
 

Jesus was love in action. His resurrection from the dead shows that love lives on and cannot be destroyed. Jesus lives in the hearts of his believers and gives us the ability to love as he loved. This homily series looks at what it means for God's love to live in us.

An offense is a wrong or a perceived wrong that we experience. We live in an age in which people get offended all the time by how they are treated as customers, offended by people who believe different things and get offended because we really are hurt by other people’s words and actions.
Offenses are inevitable. They can also be a trap that leave us in a cloud of hurt, anger, outrage, jealousy, resentment, hatred, ENTITLEMENT and probably most common of all BITTERNESS.
Living in offense keeps us from living joyfully the life we want to live. To live the life God wants us to live we must learn to avoid the bait, the trap of being offended.

The whole story of salvation and Scripture is full of defining moments. God creates moments for the men and women he invites into his larger story. They are moments of insight and understanding, moments when he offers a clean break and fresh start, there are moments in which he gives special encouragement, there are moments when he calls his leaders into something more.
In this series, we will look at the moments God uses to impact people, so that we can be open to receive them. We will also look at how we can learn to create moments for others as a way to love them. 

In our heart of hearts, we all want to be generous – to be people who are givers. This is because we bear the image of God and God is a giver. All of this world is gift. And God gave his most precious gift at Christmas when he sent his Son into the world. God loves and so God gave his son. This is why at the Christmas season we give as well.
Giving and generosity go together. To be generous means to hold our lives and all we have with an open hand. In this series we will look at how Christmas invites us into a life of generosity and offer some ways to give into this temptation.

We grow by the commitments we make and fulfill.  Committing to a marriage, a job, a friendship allows us to grow. Committing to take a class in a foreign language or to dance classes or to martial arts and fulfilling that commitment helps us to grow in our ability to do those things.  Likewise we come to mature as Christians, in Christ-likeness by the commitments we make and keep. 
In this series we will look at the power of commitment and the steps we invite people to take as a church.  These are commitments or habits that must be practiced over and over again.  Commit to a life-long journey of growth.  We will talk about both the commitments and the benefits of those commitments.  You can’t be committed to everything but its important to be committed to the right things. 

A cornerstone is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation. All other stones will be set in reference to this stone. The cornerstone determines the position and integrity of the entire structure. Over the next five weeks, we plan to look at the bedrocks of our faith and see how these foundations might help us as a church today.

Worn out? Good news in tough times.

Even when times are tough, God has good news for you and me. When we feel worn out, dispirited or experience brokenness in our world, God still has good news for us. To emphasize these facts, for a few weeks, we are going to focus in on our second reading which is Saint Paul’s letter to the people of Rome.

HOPE – Hope is the trust that somehow, one way or another, even when things don’t seem to be working out and are very difficult, our future is in God’s hands.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Our words have tremendous power for good or for evil for life or for death. This is because our ability to speak and communicate reflects the divine image we bear. God speaks the world into existence and the church grows as the word of God spreads. In this series, we will look at the power of words and how to use them for good.

What to do when you can’t believe what’s happening... The death of the Lord on the Cross brought a crisis of faith for his friends and followers. It was the end of the world as they had known it, as well as the death of all their hopes and dreams. Then something even more unbelievable happened. Something that seemed impossible. Easter celebrates the impossible things God can do in the midst of a crisis.