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Click here for more information "What is important is to realize that we are a family... and that the reason we are at church is not to be entertained but to worship God, increase our relationship with God, increase our recognition of God’s worth in our lives..."

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Pastor Greg’s Gandering The Tragedy of BP  Yeah, we’ll get to what you’re thinking, but the real focus of this Gander, is the tragedy of Botched Possibilities. I’m talking about all those daily opportunities we have that we totally botch. You know -- the chance to be kind, the chance to be helpful, the chance to be forgiving and merciful, and the chance to do what is right, even if it’s a harder thing to do. This is kind of on my mind because I had a BP today. I don’t want to go into any details, some BPs can be rather embarrassing. Let it suffice to say that my ego defense hindered my ability to be forgiving and reconciling. I said we’d get there so here we are. I am sure that the mess in the gulf was caused by a good number of BP’s BPs. (That is British Petroleum’s Botched Possibilities). There were the warning signals the day it all began. I’m sure those guys wished they wouldn’t have botched those possibilities to stop the ensuing events. There were the guys who lobbied to not have to spend money on safety equipment and procedures that would have kept the tragedy from happening. There were the BP execs that had a BP when they chose to go with profits over safety and environmental protection. Of course, there were the congressional folk who had a BP when they chose to loosen oversight and the Executive Branch folk who had a BP when they diluted enforcement and regulations. I’m sure that none of the hundreds of people who had a BP that could have (should have) stopped this tragedy ever thought that it would happen, and surely never meant for it to happen. But from laziness to greed, to other ‘less than honorable motives’ these folk’s BPs have caused a huge tragedy. But to say it again, I don’t think anybody intended this to happen. Certainly, some people’s BPs were more significant than others, but even those people who could claim they were only merely doing their job, even many of them could have kept it from happening. So do you remember that line of Jesus’ about taking the log out of your own eye before you try to take the splinter out of your neighbors? Remember that? The reality of life is that we have lots of BPs, maybe not of biblical proportions, like the gulf spill, but we have little BPs everyday. But that’s just it – it was a bunch of little BPs that brought about all the bad that has happened in the gulf. We never know how our little, seemingly insignificant, BPs may eventually cause some great pain. We can try our best to live a life of integrity, honesty and love. We can try to limit our BPs. But the reality of life is “BPs happen.” There are just too many possibilities, our choices are sometimes horribly ambiguous, and our motives often in conflict, so BPs are just bound to happen. So we ask for forgiveness -- “forgive us our BPs, as we forgive the BPs of others. And we hope in the power of God to bring good of even our worst BPs. And, we live with a bit of justified fear that ‘but by the grace of God’ our BPs don’t end up causing great pain and suffering. If only we really could just “Go, and BP no more.”