Karen Mains Blog

Advent Retreat 2011 Invitation

Advent is a time when we prepare ourselves for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.  As summer winds to a close and fall is upon us, the Advent Season will be here before we know it. We  want to invite you to participate once again this year.  Sibyl Towner (author, Listen to Your Life) and I will be facilitating this retreat which will be held on December 1 -2, 2011 at Bishop Lane Retreat House, Rockford, IL.

There are only few spaces left.   To  register, you can go to this link ==> http://www.breathingspaceorg.com/tiffany/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Advent-Retreat-Registration.pdf

We look forward to seeing many of you again this year!  Praying for abundant blessings from the Lord this coming Thanksgiving and Christmas 2011.

 

 

Charity Plant Sale 2011

It's almost September and a few months from now, we'll be sending goodbyes to 2011.  Today is the best time to plant a tree since we'll be having a charity plant sale this coming Sept. 9 - 10, 2011.   If you would like to buy plants at bargain prices, this is the small window in time where you can still transplant them and give them a couple of months to root before winter and freezing temperatures arrive.  Proceeds will go toward defraying some of the above costs to underwrite the Global Bag Project. For your queries, send me a mail via e-mail at info@hungrysouls.org. or leave a message on the office phone: 630-293-4500.  Any volunteer help the proceeding week or that weekend will be greatly appreciated.

Pursuit of Frugality

by Karen Mains

Our new office administrator at Mainstay Ministries, Heather Ann Martinez, is an ordained Anglican priest. This actually has nothing to do with one of her unusual capacities, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that ministerial function: Heather Ann delights in saving Mainstay money.

She came to work for us before Christmas of 2010 and has taken delight (sort of a savings game) in stretching the donor’s dollar that supports our ministry. Often, we hear Heather Ann chortling, “Hey-hey-hey. I just saved us _______ (whatever the amount).”

Heather Ann renegotiated our Internet service contract to better meet our needs; that will save $25/month. She procured a simpler Canon copier because we no longer really require the fancier machine. This lowered our monthly rental fee by $225. She discovered that paper products were cheaper at a national box store chain than those at the local office-supply store—a savings of $10 every six weeks or so. She renegotiated our Cimco phone-service contract, lowering the monthly fee some $30. Her last coup was to take the financials systems in-house, put them all on QuickBooks—a savings of $200 per month.

Heather Ann says, “It may sound silly…” when I ask her to name some of the ministry frugalities she has achieved. But, it’s not silly when you total the amounts because the savings add up. In just the items named above (there are more), Heather Ann’s careful attention will save us $5,940 per year—no small amount. No little silly thing at all.

This principle of cumulative impact cuts across many of life’s activities. The more we do something, the more effect it has. The more we exercise, for instance, the more we reap the benefit of physical discipline. The more we walk, the more we can walk.

The same is true about looking for God’s activity in the world. The more attention we give to hunting for God’s daily interventions in our common life, the more we will become facile in finding Him.

I spy God in Heather Ann’s diligent pursuit of frugality; without a doubt it is benefiting our entire ministry, helping us to do God’s work in the world better. The fact that she takes such delight in penny-pinching makes it every day a treasure hunt here in the office.

Sunday Is The Gift Of Time

The concept behind the Sabbath is that God has given us the gift of time; 24 hours that are not to be crowded with the cares of the workweek; 24 hours for rest and recreation that are not to be intruded upon with the worries of ordinary time (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday).

How can I make Sunday the best day of the week?

Award-winning author Karen Mains shows you how to make Sunday the best day of the week. For years Karen Mains and her husband, David Mains, have searched for ways to make worship more meaningful. In Making Sunday Special, Karen Mains shareswhat they discovered in an examination of the Sabbath-keeping principles that not only restore to Sunday a sense of the holy but even give work and leisure renewed meaning.

Torschlusspanik

Torschlusspanik – a German word which means "the fear that time is running out." In her latest Hungry Souls newsletter, Karen Mains explores her own torschlusspanik, not that she feels she’s running out of time. But we could never tell when our time is up. So she makes an appeal to friends to help her finish and continue what she has started because " there could not be anything more satisfactory than to rest my head, take a deep breath, and sigh, It is finished. How wonderful that would be.”

Read the entry here.

Time and Energy on Hospitality

by Karen Mains

Establishing priorities is essentially a matter of making choices. In six months the choices will be different. There will be time for the personal counseling I enjoy, for speaking engagements, for long walks going nowhere, for the intellectual feeding from library shelves, for taking a high school growth group, and for my greatest of all loves, the open door with people in every room, with food well-prepared, candles glowing, and laughter and love.

The amount of time available to us determines the quantity and personality of our hospitality. Up until recently, my husband David Mains and I have carried on an extensive ministry of availability almost every day of the week. When we were led to devote so much time to people who lived with us, the ministry of an open house began to diminish.

Now both David and I have priority activities which require long hours of seclusion. We have had to refrain temporarily from the style of former days, participating sometimes in nothing more than hospitable attitudes. I can now sympathize with those people who have such consuming work that they have to state, “I don’t have the time or the energy to be hospitable.”

On the other hand, there are people who can devote large amounts of time and energy to hospitality. The temptation which always accompanies this situation is to do more than is required. It is easy to spend days in elaborate preparations which have nothing to do with ministry but a great deal to do with demonstrating one’s own abilities. One must look carefully at those hidden motives and ask, “Am I really seeking to serve, or am I trying to impress?”

"Whales!"

by Karen Mains

Rounding Provincetown, the pilot began to aim for the sea. Suddenly, off in the distance, I spied a white spume—at least I think it was a spume. “Whales!” announced the public-address-system voice. “Ten o’clock on the port side of the ship!” From that point on, it was whale-spotting for at least another two hours straight. A pod was traveling and feeding together. They breached the waters in twos and threes, their flukes regularly striking the surface. Several gathered around the ship—our narrator naturalist calling out their location, “Starboard—3 o’clock! Portside—11 o’clock.” She was so familiar with the whales, she could identify them by their scars. “That’s Lulu. Lulu has a calf.”

The afternoon was filled with amazing implosions—whooshes of air from blowholes, to the right and to the left. The crowd on the ship sighted whales in groups here, there; the guide called out names. The huge cetaceans danced their water ballet so close to us, we felt like we could reach out and brush their sides with our hands.

All I could think was, Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights. … Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps. Psalm 148:1,7, RSV.

I had this strange feeling the whales had come to see us, to check us out, to raise our delight with their wild plunges, flapping their huge tales in greetings, putting on a show to the oohs and aahs of the watching passengers.

Although we traveled this summer up the St. Lawrence Seaway, visited Old Quebec City, toured Prince Edward Island, listened to Scottish music on Cape Breton Island, took a bus tour of Halifax, stayed for a morning at Plimoth Plantation, trekked the grandchildren along the Freedom Trail in Boston (in the rain), walked the Lexington Commons and crossed the historic bridge at Concord, when asked about the highlight of this journey, my answer would definitely be, “Whale-watching off Provincetown.”

Do you sing this hymn in your church? Without knowing it, the scientists, the fisherman, the rescue teams, little children on the whale-watching ship sing it whenever they say, “Oh, how wonderful! What an enigma! Look, look. Over there—no, over there!”

God is love, let heaven adore him; God is Love, let earth rejoice;
Let creation sing before him and exalt him with one voice.
God who laid the earth’s foundation, God who spread heavens above,
God who breathes through all creation: God is Love, eternal love.

Let us, however, be intentional with our praise.

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!
Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!
Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!
Young men and women alike, old and young together!
Psalm 148:9-12, RSV.

Sometimes, when we take a really deep look at the world, and see Him, nameless though He might be, some of us are never the same. Let us look deeply into the deep.

Living, Loving, Leading by David and Karen Mains

Living, Loving, Leading is a book from award-winning authors David and Karen Mains. It offers a tangible, "seeable" model for encouraging your family's spiritual development. Join David and Karen as they suggest some helpful, biblical ideas for raising the spiritual temperature of your home. Walk with them as they describe their own struggles and triumphs, and as they search for workable solutions to the crucial question, "How can we become the spiritual leaders of our family that God wants us to be?"

Close Encounters of the Casual Kind

by Karen Mains

For my birthday last week, David and I used our Metro Regional Transportation Authority “Seniors Ride Free” passes to go into Chicago. Rumor has it that the state legislature is going to cancel this program since Illinois is facing one of the worst budget deficits among the 50 states so we are trying to employ these passes as much as possible before the hatchet falls.

Last spring, because of the fact that Riccardo Mutti was named the new artistic director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, my husband purchased a series of tickets, which are serving as our anniversary, Christmas, birthday, and Valentine’s Day gifts. We arrived at Ogilvie Station on January 19, where a bitter biting wind forced us to catch a taxi. Consequently, we had an hour to spend in the Art Institute (where the Chagall stained-glass windows have been cleaned and reinstalled) before our dinner reservation. At 6 p.m. we hustled across Michigan Avenue to have dinner at the Russian Tea Time Restaurant. Read full article at Hungry Souls.

I Wish I Could Take Credit For Being Green

by Karen Mains

I wish I could take credit for the fact that I compost and recycle everything I can and am consequently, in this area at least, really, really "green."

But no, this comes from being raised as the daughter of parents who survived the Great Depression (the one in the thirties), and who remembered soup lines and tent cities and the Dust Bowls, and good folk broken because they had lost everything. As a child, men came to our third-floor apartment backdoor, begging for food. Mother would have the man wait on the porch and she would fix him a sandwich. "What if that were a son of mine, going hungry?" she would ask of me, a child of five or six. My parents never had much, but they were generous people. They were also frugal; "waste not; want not" was a family motto. A garden was the first thing they put in our suburban home when they moved out of the city. The upstairs bedrooms (the heated ones) were rented to college students. My father refused to let my mother buy a certain dress for my sister (because it was too much to pay for one dress) but it was OK to buy two dresses for the same amount. You get the picture.

And do you know what? We separate cans and bottles. I stack newspapers and magazines, flatten cereal and cracker boxes, and I compost all our degradable kitchen waste. A metal garbage can waits in the garage for me to dig in all that smelly good stuff that creates black friable soil in my garden. I love the alternate retail economies—Craigslist, eBay, garage sales, roadside "TAKE IT—IT'S FREE" signs. Because we've been living frugally, I have absolute confidence that we can make it through hard economic times. Read more at Hungry Souls...