51����

Note: Chaplain Peter Hartwig will be sharing a Daily Devotional between now and Sunday, October 13. 

First of all, it was so good to see so many of you at Chapel on Zoom today and to have a virtual touchpoint as a community. We’ll be offering another Chapel service next week – same time and place. Please let me know if you’d like to be involved! 

We all have different groups of friends: “camp friends” or “tennis friends” or “friends from your old school.” Facebook (if you’re old), Facetime (if you’re about my age), and Snapchat (if you’re a young’un) make it easy enough to stay in touch. But it wasn’t so long ago that the only real communication you could have with long distance friends was a letter. 

A big part of the Bible is made up of letters. We are literally reading someone else’s mail. Usually that’s a felony. But for Believers, reading through these letters is sacred stuff. I’d like to spend these devotionals looking at one particular letter: 1 Thessalonians. 

It was written by one of the very first pastors, a Jewish man named Paul. He wrote this letter to a church that he had founded in the Greek city of Thessalonica. If you want to see a not-so-great photo of me and Harrison White ‘26 with a heinously jet lagged group in Thessaloniki this summer, scroll down…

Paul started this church there, and things were going really well for about a month. Then a mob broke out and tried to kill him, so he had to leave (Acts 17). He headed south through Greece without any real news about the friends he’d left behind. But then his mentee, Timothy, managed to get him the news that the crew back in Thessalonica was doing really well!

So he wrote them a letter. Go ahead and read if you like. 

You’ll see that Paul starts off the letter the way anyone would start off an email or a text to a friend you hadn’t seen in forever, a friend they really missed. He essentially says, “I’m so grateful you’re in my life. Remember all the good times we had? I pray for you all the time.” 

Less than a week ago, we were all together. But now, my 51���� friends, we are all over the world. The way Paul talks about the community he left behind in Thessalonica – that’s the way I hope we Greenies talk about each other while we are apart. Let’s give thanks to God for one another. Let’s mention each other in prayer. Let’s keep each other in mind. Let’s hold to those good memories. We’re still a community. 

I look forward to the day we can be together again soon. Until tomorrow, H.