At the close of my message this morning at Shippensburg First Wesleyan, I read the following letter to our church family –

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Here’s a link to a PDF of the letter.

We sense God’s perfect peace in this transition. We appreciate the prayers and support of our friends and family as we navigate this transitional period.

I’m working from my “mobile office” today and am reflecting on the whirlwind of Easter-prep over the past several weeks. As I am debriefing myself on the Easter-happenings I can’t help but be overwhelmingly thankful for each of the other three members of my immediate family that God has so richly blessed me with.

We took and I posted this family photo on Easter Sunday with the caption, “I’m so proud to serve Jesus with this team!” – and that couldn’t be more true! It really is a blessing to know that our family-team is ALL-IN to make MUCH of Jesus Christ, TOGETHER!

As I continue to review the past few weeks and the opportunities for ministry a genuine smile forms on my face as I remember our kids stuffing Easter Eggs with a team of volunteers from our church – the same eggs they would help a similar group of people spread all around our church property – and minutes later, those same eggs would be “found” by these two as they hunted them with their same-age peers from the community. I’m smiling as I reflect on my wife playing phone-tag for weeks with our ‘hopeful’ candy-donor for the egg hunt, her MANY trips to area-stores to gather supplies for our Easter festivities at church, her late-nights preparing food and kid-friendly activity pages for the possible visiting young people during this Season. I’m reminded of her willingness to overwhelm her community-connections with our Easter-events and her personal invitations to many over the past several weeks. At our Easter Egg hunt alone, I’m certain a large portion of families who attended from our community were personally invited by her!

And just last night, after we returned from a quick 24-hour post-Easter visit with my parents a couple hours away in Middleburg, we returned to our Easter-just-happened-here-home for only a few minutes before the opportunity to visit a newly-hospitalized member of our congregation presented itself and ALL THREE OF THEM jumped at the opportunity, ran back to the family minivan and went with me to visit this gentleman and his wife at the hospital.

While I’m the only paid minister at our small church, I can say without a doubt that our ministry team is far-larger and often comes in a package of 4-people who share the same last name of Sheets. I’m thankful for the ministry-heritage I was born into that reflected some of these same characteristics – with an understanding that while Dad was the pastor, our entire family had been given an opportunity to serve Jesus, His Church, and love on people!

I pray that I can continue to lead my family to minister TOGETHER – even in ways we haven’t even imagined yet!

Here’s a video of our “Sheets Family Quartet” singing ‘Mercy Tree’ this past Easter Sunday morning –