Prelude to Flourishing
Each week, Pastor Kim will provide resources to accompany the sermon series, including a Spotify playlist, a poem, a book recommendation, and a tool to help you apply what you're learning.
Start by watching or listening to the sermon, "Prelude to Flourishing," then check out the resources below.
Start by watching or listening to the sermon, "Prelude to Flourishing," then check out the resources below.
Spotify playlist: Click here
These are songs whose theme is human flourishing — or cries for human flourishing from places of sorrowing. If you have songs you'd like to suggest to add to the list, please email them to me kim@folcov.org.
The purpose of this playlist is to help you live the gift that is your life!!! Hopefully the Holy Spirit will connect you to the Word, reminders of God’s desires for the human race, understandings of how our neighbors engage with life and much more!
Many of these songs will be from artists who may not personally know Jesus—they are here because all good things are taken up into the life of God and belong to God. He provided the resources to create these songs and when they are shared they become part of the good gifts that God gives us.
New songs will be added based on new themes that arise from our time in the Word on Sundays!
Poem: "We Used to Grade God’s Sunsets from the Lost Valley Beach" by Rod Jellama
Why we really watched we never said.
The play of spectral light, but maybe also
the coming dark, and the need to trust
that the fire dying down before us
into Lake Michigan’s cold waves
would rise again behind us.
Our arch and witty critiques
covered our failures to say what we saw.
The madcap mockery of grading God as though
He were a struggling student artist
(Cut loose, strip it down, study Matisse
and risk something, something unseen—
C-plus, keep trying—that sort of thing)
only hid our fear of His weather
howling through the galaxies. We humored
a terrible truth: that nature gives us hope
only in flashes, split seconds, one
at a time, fired in a blaze of beauty.
Picking apart those merely actual sunsets,
we stumbled into knowing the artist’s job:
to sort out, then to seize and work an insight
until it’s transformed into permanence.
And God, brushing in for us the business
of clouds and sky, really is a hawker
of clichés, a sentimental hack as a painter.
He means to be. He leaves it to us
to catch and revise, to find the forms
of how and who in this world we really are
and would be, to see how much promise there is
on a hurtling planet, swung from a thread
of light and saved by nothing but grace.
Rod Jellema, A Slender Grace: Poems (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 33
Why we really watched we never said.
The play of spectral light, but maybe also
the coming dark, and the need to trust
that the fire dying down before us
into Lake Michigan’s cold waves
would rise again behind us.
Our arch and witty critiques
covered our failures to say what we saw.
The madcap mockery of grading God as though
He were a struggling student artist
(Cut loose, strip it down, study Matisse
and risk something, something unseen—
C-plus, keep trying—that sort of thing)
only hid our fear of His weather
howling through the galaxies. We humored
a terrible truth: that nature gives us hope
only in flashes, split seconds, one
at a time, fired in a blaze of beauty.
Picking apart those merely actual sunsets,
we stumbled into knowing the artist’s job:
to sort out, then to seize and work an insight
until it’s transformed into permanence.
And God, brushing in for us the business
of clouds and sky, really is a hawker
of clichés, a sentimental hack as a painter.
He means to be. He leaves it to us
to catch and revise, to find the forms
of how and who in this world we really are
and would be, to see how much promise there is
on a hurtling planet, swung from a thread
of light and saved by nothing but grace.
Rod Jellema, A Slender Grace: Poems (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 33
Book recommendation
In this elegant book Jamie Smith provides “a profound and beguiling meditation on time (and therefore death), on embodiment (and therefore love), on creaturehood (and therefore our orientation toward God).
Philosophically rigorous and creatively daring, this original and provocative exploration summons each of us to diligent thinking and unflinching honesty, to ( in Smith’s own phrase) ‘shared vulnerability’ and deep prayer”
Charles Marsh
“ . . . A sensuous narrative that asks us to recalibrate our idea of time so that we might carry ourselves, with grace and gratitude through it”
Beth Kephart
Available here:
In this elegant book Jamie Smith provides “a profound and beguiling meditation on time (and therefore death), on embodiment (and therefore love), on creaturehood (and therefore our orientation toward God).
Philosophically rigorous and creatively daring, this original and provocative exploration summons each of us to diligent thinking and unflinching honesty, to ( in Smith’s own phrase) ‘shared vulnerability’ and deep prayer”
Charles Marsh
“ . . . A sensuous narrative that asks us to recalibrate our idea of time so that we might carry ourselves, with grace and gratitude through it”
Beth Kephart
Available here: