This past Sunday was the Celebration of Life service for Ray Labbe, a longtime friend of our church and one of the missionaries we have supported through his work with Isaiah 58.  The writer of Ecclesiastes writes in 7:2 that “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man.”  Even though this wasn’t technically a funeral, the point remains that there is much to be learned from reflecting on our own mortality and evaluating how we are living in the light of that.  When we consider how we would like to be remembered at the end of our lives, and more importantly how we will be judged by our God when we meet him, we often recognize what really matters in our life.

I was able to record the last hour of the memorial service, which included mostly testimonies from people who knew Ray on the impact he left on their life, and I have added the audio at the end of this entry.  I would encourage you to listen to the testimonies if you weren’t able to attend the service, so that you can get an idea of how God used this man to make a difference in so many lives, and hopefully be inspired to allow God to do the same in your life. 
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This past Sunday, I joked that the best evangelist in our church has been Mr. www.newlife-glastonbury.org, our website.  That was meant both to challenge our church members to consider who God might be asking them to invite to church or to the Family Fun Day this Easter season, as well as to honor what God has done through the hard work of Matt LaCroix, who created and administers our website.  As a church that only recently moved into a 7-day a week space, our website has been instrumental in serving as a front door to our church for many people who want to learn more about us, and we have been blessed to have someone like Matt who has dedicated numerous unpaid hours to giving us an excellent presence on the internet.  Our goal with the website has been to give people a picture of what our church is like before they even enter our doors, as well as to provide another opportunity for our sermons and Pulse essays to reach people with the gospel.

Matt and I have been working the past couple of months on a redesign of the website, and this Sunday we launched the new site.  Read more »

Last week I talked about the recent passing of Ray Labbe, a dear friend of our church and the leader of Isaiah 58 ministry.  I was blessed to be able to spend some good time with Ray’s wife Linda last week as we prepared for his Celebration of Life service (to be held Sunday, March 22nd from 1-3 at the Riverfront Community Center in Glastonbury), and she mentioned how healing it has been to let her heart be grateful for all the time she had with Ray.  It is so easy, and certainly understandable, to lapse into self-pity upon the death of a loved one, but choosing instead to be grateful for the life that was shared can really help lift the spirit to God and back to health. 

Michele and I recently experienced a death in our extended family – not someone we were close to, but an important person to some of the people we are close to – and it highlighted again for me the contrast between the death of someone who knew God the way Ray did and the death of someone who might not have known God.  Not to mention, of course, how those who know God cope with death compared to how those who do not believe in a God cope with the finality of death.  So for all who have struggled with a recent loss, I thought I would briefly recap the three Biblical truths about death which I had preached on back on November 9th of last year during the “Death and the Life after that” series:
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 Back at the end of November, The Hartford Courant published an article about the food problem in New Britain and how an increasing number of people were going without food because of the worsening economic climate.  In that article, they mentioned Isaiah 58, a ministry led by Ray Labbe that had been feeding the hungry and homeless faithfully almost every Saturday since 1990.  This service to the people of New Britain was staggering for two reasons – most importantly, for the remarkable faithfulness to God displayed over 18 years of ministry, and secondly, for how under the radar it was!  With no fanfare, no marketing plan, and no desire for glory, Ray and a team of volunteers had been preparing hot soup, hot dogs, bags of apples and canned goods, and lots of other food, packing up the big blue van, and carrying it all across the river to New Britain for the simple reason that God tells us to:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter– when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Isaiah 58:6-7)

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