Featured
Featured
Emmaus has been given a property in downtown Raleigh and officially signed the deed!
We need God’s direction, and we fully believe that God speaks to us, His church, and He does so at both a personal and corporate level. To that end, the Emmaus elders believe that a call to prayer and fasting is part of the Lord’s desired response from us.
Dear Emmaus Family, We love the Fowlers.
Over the last 5 years they led our community with grace, compassion, and wisdom, and embodied Jesus to us in both big and small ways. Bryan taught us the Bible with integrity, with the goal of moving us closer to Jesus and closer to each other.
By now most of you are aware that the Fowler family is in a season of transition. So we want to take this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you and let you know that we will be making our cross country move back to Oregon at the end of April.
Today marks the beginning of the 40 days of Lent leading up to Easter Sunday and today according the liturgical church calendar for millions of Christians and for 100’s of years, the church has commemorated “Ash Wednesday” (maybe you’ve noticed people with ashes on their foreheads around town)— Ash Wednesday is a day of humbling ourselves in fasting, prayer and repentance as we begin the Lenten season.
Do you ever daydream about a time when things will be different than they are now? Sometimes it’s discontentment or not being present… but there are times when that sense of future bliss is the Kingdom of God bubbling up in our hearts!
The game of Chess has gained recent popularity with the male population of the Fowler household. I admit I’m slower these days to want to learn a new thing that requires thinking strategically, and so far have avoided the competition around the dining room table.
We stood in a hospital room this past week, praying over a beautiful two year old girl who is fighting for her life. The tubes coming out of her in multiple directions and the bandages covering her head painted a bleak picture. We prayed over her parents, utterly consumed and confused by what was happening to the precious daughter. We prayed the night prior, multiple people uttering prayer after prayer. We have prayed through the past two years, multiple times, together, by ourselves, in large groups and small, loudly and softly.
“Who do you think she looks like, you or Erik?” If we had a dollar for every time we’ve heard this question in the last 9 weeks since our daughter’s birth, we’d have a pretty good chunk of change right about now. Psychologists say it’s common for us to look for recognizable characteristics in the people around us; we all look for traits, however big or small, that help us relate to each other and better make sense of our interpersonal relationships.
This year as with many “Holy Fridays” in the past, I am re-reading Isaiah 53 “The Suffering Servant” prophecy written some 700 yrs before Christ came. My approach to the Isaiah reading this year has varied slightly as I have introduced a practice I learned about recently called Lectio Divina Latin for divine reading. Lectio Divina is basically a prayerful Scripture reading practice that has been in use for over a thousand years. The practice is simply a way of ruminating on God’s Word and listening to what He has to say to us from Scripture.