Rossford United Methodist Church

Rossford United Methodist Church Mission Statement:"To Know Christ and To Make Christ Known"

06/08/2026

Monday, June 8, 2026

Psalm 55: 6

6And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest…

Psalm 73: 23

23Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand…



Ever wanted to fly away?

Many years ago, my family took our elderly mother to a fine restaurant to celebrate her 84th birthday. I can never forget how the dinner closed. We had arranged for a beautiful cake, and a waiter served the pieces to us, serving her first.

“Happy birthday,” he said. “I hope you have many more.”

My mother, who by that time paid little heed to politeness, preferring instead plain honesty in a way so many old people do, responded in a manner which erased the waiter’s smiling joy in an instant.

“I hope it’s the last one,” she said.

Her absolute sincerity cast a pall over a joyous evening, and I later asked why she had said such a thing. She seemed, after all, in relatively good health for her age, still lived in her own home, still was capable of driving and carrying out the myriad duties of life, shopping, light cleaning, attending church, and so forth.

“Everyone I ever knew has died,” she said. “All my friends are gone. My brothers and sisters. I can feel my mind going. I am ready.”

Ever since that day, I have reflected a little on the nature of prayer. I believe most of us treat prayer as a formal thing, a moment when we stop normal activity and turn our minds to God, often a moment filled with desperate pleas, a time when emotion often overcomes us because of intractable problems and desperate realities. I decided, finally, that my mom’s statement was a fervent prayer, spoken to people, but heard by God. Within a week, she was involved in an auto crash, suffered a brain aneurysm, went into a coma, and died.

The doctors told us the aneurysm was, indeed, caused by the crash, but occurred only because she had probably undergone several small strokes in the preceding months. I think she knew, and I think her words were her prayer.

My mother, like almost everyone I know, had great moments of joy in her life and terrible seasons of pain and struggle. She was apart from her first husband for years while he fought on the Pacific Islands. Her marriage failed a decade after the war when he became an alcoholic and abandoned her, leaving behind his three children. For years, we lived on the cliff’s edge of absolute poverty, saved only by her courageous struggle to provide. She was Roman Catholic, and in the 1950s that meant divorce was absolutely prohibited. Her church refused her sacraments.

She lost her church for a time, but she never lost her faith. She insisted we children attend church classes and worship regularly. A cross always had a place in our home, as did the Bible.

She prevailed, I believe, not because of her strength or her faith or her knowledge. She prevailed because she never let go of the hand of God, who was with her in every time and place.

We all want at times to flee, to leave behind some struggle, some difficulty. We are all ready at times to surrender. Nevertheless, we are not alone. A hand is there to hold ours, to lift us, to give us strength. A power exists which hears our prayers, even when we don’t intend them to be prayers. The power is love.

Help me, O Lord, to be with you continually, to hold you ever in my mind.



Hymn of the day: The Prayer. Rossford UMC - Media.



Rev. Lawrence Keeler

06/05/2026

Friday, June 5, 2026

Psalm 62: 1-2 (ESV)

1For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation.
2 He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.



Dietrich Bonhoeffer, preaching as a young pastor, began his sermon on this psalm in a strange manner. He spoke of the man who first prayed the prayer, thousands of years ago, probably kneeling in a Jewish temple or synagogue. An upright man. Someone caught in the storms of life, seeking rest and peace.

“He absorbed it,” Bonhoeffer said, “drunk it deeply into his soul; it was his holy rest, and he was able to say, ‘My soul finds rest in God alone, my salvation comes from him.’”

The young pastor also recognized something strange. The ancient Jew did not say “I find rest,” but rather “my soul finds rest.”

“Is there anything like a soul in our days, this age of machines, of warring commercial deals, in an age when fashion and sports dominate our world,” he asked.

Bonhoeffer could well have been speaking of our world, our time, our nation, our place. Where can we find rest in this age of cell phones, computers, and technology? In this era of war, so similar to that era when he spoke? When once again the peoples of the world find themselves turning into savage tribes, each seeking the destruction of another?

How strange he should begin his sermon reflecting on a man from another tribe which his own tribe now hated and sought to destroy! That man had a soul, he seemed to say, leaving unasked the only relevant question: Where, therefore, are our souls?

I found myself reflecting on my own soul. Will my soul have the courage to speak against those who would destroy a neighbor? Will it have the strength to stand, as Bonhoeffer’s soul did, before others and to question the wrongheadedness and evil of his generation? Darkness once again seems to flow over the earth. Multitudes of my neighbors seek only to find someone to hate, someone to repress, someone to destroy. We live in an age of wrath!

Will my soul dare to speak aloud, knowing it stands on a heavenly rock?

The psalm, Bonhoeffer noted, “speaks the language of our greatest responsibility and deepest seriousness: You, a human being, have a soul. Take care that you do not lose it, that you do not, one day, awake from the turmoil of your life – professional as well as private – and see that within you is an emptiness…” (My Soul Finds Rest, Internet Archive, 26.)



Hymn of the day: Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley. Rossford UMC - Media.



Rev. Lawrence Keeler

06/04/2026

Thursday, June 4, 2026

Proverbs 1: 20-23

20Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
21At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
22“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
23Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.



I stumbled recently onto the writings of one of the 20th Century’s great thinkers, E.F. Schumacher, and I am profoundly moved by the clarity of his reflections on society and the world. He truly was prophetic.

“There are four main characteristics of modern industrial society which, in light of the gospels, must accounted four great and grievous evils.

“1. Its vastly complicated nature.

“2. Its continuous stimulation of, and reliance on, the deadly sins of greed, envy, and avarice.

“3. Its destruction of the content and dignity of most forms of work.

“4. Its authoritarian character, owing to organization in excessively large units.” (Good Work, 29)

Schumacher was greatly concerned with the rapidly growing divide between rich and poor people in the modern world. Richer communities, he argued convincingly, are increasingly unable to help poorer communities because they have lost touch with the very fabric of society for most of the population of the earth. Schumacher was deeply committed to mission work in the world, and he spoke from deep and long personal experience.

An example: Poor farmers in Africa needed help. Rich societies suggested the use of modern technology, of chemical fertilizers, and the use of modern heavy equipment. But the poor African farmers had no money, no access to a ready supply of fuel, no infrastructure to support high technology. All they had was a willingness to work and an ample pool of labor. They didn’t farm 1,000 acres at a time. All they needed was some form of cheap and simple mechanical tool which used less fuel, cost less, and was simpler to repair.

Here is the delusion of modern industrial society: Bigger is always better.

For thousands of years, humans have reveled in the joy of wisdom. A carpenter takes pleasure from his ability to cut a board accurately, to create something meaningful. A seamstress sees beauty in the fabrics she can bring together to create a new garment. Industrial methods have destroyed wisdom itself by demanding that thousands of workers daily grind their souls to dust performing routine repetitive actions which involve little human thought or initiative.

Do we need the economies of scale that such systems provide? Absolutely. But we need to allow wisdom back into the system. We are doomed to fail if we slowly destroy ourselves for the pleasure of holding a dollar.

Jesus spent most of his time with the little people of the world. He trusted the wisdom of common workers over that of priests and scribes. When he did select a wise man here and there from among the ranks of the powerful (Matthew, Zaccheus, and Nicodemus, as examples), he called them back into simplicity itself, into the work of living for others.

Schumacher didn’t speak in political terms, yet I suspect his wisdom points to the ultimate political outcome of “bigger is better.” Perhaps this is why we have inherited the modern chaos and insanity tearing our world and our nation apart.

It’s worth thinking about.



Hymn of the day: Sweet Hour of Prayer/His Eye is on the Sparrow. Rossford UMC - Media.



Rev. Lawrence Keeler

06/03/2026

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

1 Samuel 3: 1b

1… The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.



We seldom pay attention to the possibility we spend most of our time deluding ourselves. If we stop and think, though, we would realize we tend to see everything through the prism of self. We do not like to admit our ignorance of most things, nor do we even realize consciously that everything we see is flavored, colored, reshaped to fit our personal expectations, needs, desires, and biases.

We pass through time, as it were, on a personally defined railroad track which has only one view. Our own.

We tend to believe and support those who buttress our own views, and these blindnesses – our own blindness and that of those who think exactly as we think – make it almost impossible for us to consider we might be wrong. We find ourselves living amid the echoes of untruth.

It’s hard to embrace that which we cannot see or hear.

How can we reach our goal when our maps are wrong?

Thus, mystics and contemplatives came to believe long ago that much of what we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear does not represent the highest reality. Willing to suspend their personal outlook, they saw us living in a world in which the people could not see the ever-present God, nor hear His voice. All most people heard, they realized, were the echoes of their own minds, endlessly repeating that which had hardened into their own vision of goodness or faith or hope.

No matter, the technologists shout. We have social networks, artificial intelligence, science. Don’t worry, the politicians shout. We know the right thing to do. God is dead, the philosophers sometimes teach.

The voice of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

When God called to Samuel (God calls – relentlessly, endlessly, every day in every place – to every one of us), Samuel mistook the voice to be that of his teacher Eli. Finally, he realized it was God speaking.

What is God saying to me today? Each of us needs to ask himself or herself that question. Then we need to wipe our minds clean of intrusion and listen.



Hymn of the day: Seek Ye First. Rossford UMC - Media.


Rev. Lawrence Keeler

06/02/2026

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Psalm 146: 1

1 Hallelujah!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.



Thank you, God, for the gifts of garden and relationship.

“Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene,” Thomas Merton wrote. “Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under his sky.” (“New Seeds of Contemplation,” quoted in Through the Year with Thomas Merton, 10)

It’s important, at least to me, to experience time alone each and every day. Equally important, I need to see trees, flowers, animals, and the ever-changing sky above. Merton made the point somewhere that one cannot keep playing his or her fictitious roles in a wood. When we visit a wood alone, we have no one to impress, to convince, to whom we can prevaricate. The woods don’t care about our personal madnesses.

“When you are by yourself,” he wrote, “you soon get tired of your craziness. It is too exhausting. It does not fit in with the eminent sanity of trees, birds, water, sky. You have to shut up and go about the business of living.”

It is, I suppose, an inexplicable paradox. One cannot live fully while alone. We were designed and made for relationship. That is the unassailable truth in Genesis 2. One need not read the Bible, though, to experience the truth. Our greatest joys come when we surrender to another. In that chapter, which differs markedly from chapter 1, Adam is alone until he surrenders a rib. Thereafter, he has a companion.

The Bible recognizes a serious problem, though. Once we come together, tensions begin to form. It’s normal, I suppose, for each of us to want to have what the others have. Even to want to have more than others have. This, too, is a truth of nature. The strongest lion gets to eat first and to enjoy the most tender portions of its victims.

This, too, is in the Bible. Cain wanted what Abel had.

It’s simple, really. The only way to reshape community into beauty is to escape for a moment from the madness. There we can learn to offer sanity as a gift to the community. We need both the spiritual freedom of solitude and the wondrous gift of servitude in community.

The world is boiling right now. The eternal battle. Each wants what the other has. We will live every day in hot water until we turn yet again to the empowering Spirit of God in nature. It’s the only way we can surrender our madness.

God’s garden safeguards our sanity.



Hymn of the day: I Come to the Garden Alone. Rossford UMC - Media.





Rev. Lawrence Keeler

06/01/2026

Monday, June 1, 2026

Psalm 85: 10-11

10Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

11Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.

A parable offered by Dr. Abraham Heschel:

“Rabbi Shimon said.

“When God was about to create Adam, the ministering angels split into contending groups. Some said, ‘Let him be created!” while others cried, ‘Let him not be created…’

“Mercy said, ‘Let him be created for he will do merciful deeds.’ Truth said, ‘Let him not be created for he will be false.’ Righteousness said, ‘Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds.’ Peace said, ‘Let him not be created, for he will never cease quarreling.’

“What did the Holy One, blessed be he, do? He took truth and cast it into the ground.”

We should pay heed to Dr. Heschel’s very serious understanding of the little story. He believed God had buried truth in a grave, in the dirt. I too believe that. God buried truth inside Adam. The very name describes us as we really are. We are made of the dust of the earth. And truth lies in a cold tomb inside us.

“A tragedy had occurred,” Dr. Heschel wrote. “The soul had been perverted; it had become a piece of flesh. People were more concerned with their empty pockets than their empty souls. They were obsessed by their material wants. Even in the synagogue they were moved to tears while reciting the prayers for a livelihood. Yet they dared to dream of the luxuries to be enjoyed in the life to come. Their conceptions of Heaven were a travesty, a distortion. They took pleasure in… their own righteousness! They talked about the Messiah – but their lips were not worthy of even uttering His name. When they performed good deeds, they thought they were doing the Almighty a favor.” (A Passion for Truth, 14.)

I, a Christian, believe the Messiah has come and has instructed us as to the manner in which Truth might rise from its grave in the dirt. If we read His gospels truly, we will see. We, like Him, will prepare to die to the self. We will, like Him, pour out our lives for others.

In this, we will find life, and Truth will rise from its grave.



Hymn of the day: Why Me, Lord? Rossford UMC - Media.





Rev. Lawrence Keeler

05/31/2026

Welcome to our service.

05/29/2026

Friday, May 29, 2026

Psalm 35: 20

20 For they do not plan for peace, but invent deceitful schemes against the quiet in the land.



What if we chose to live without words?

A strange question. A difficult one, particularly, for someone who chose long ago to build a career out of words, first written, then spoken. One must consider carefully the purpose of words and, beyond that, the intent of those who base their lives on words.

Words bring us much that is beautiful and necessary. Information we might need. New approaches to old problems. Advances in quality of life. Without words, we might find ourselves unable, like those humans of old who sought to build a tower to the heavens, incapable of relating to one another. Incapable of completing any difficult task.

But words have a dirtier side. Crafty humans use words to manipulate, to control, to take advantage. They hide truth in a blizzard of words, to create emotional storms which erupt in violence and hatred. Wars rise out of words. Words impel humans to kill and to die. To hate. Words, rather than bringing us together, can divide and destroy.

Words. Beauty and ugliness ever-present.

The ancients thought deeply about the power of words. Once spoken, they believed, a word took on a life of its own, indestructible, ever-present, with a power beyond that even of the person who spoke it.

We’re afraid, I suspect, to enter into silence. Many of history’s contemplatives have learned this. Abraham Heschel, a Jew, and Thomas Merton, a Christian, both expressed their thoughts on the matter.

“The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smokescreen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things,” Merton wrote. “In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things… (This) is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control, and even to despise (because they could not contain it), comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.” (“Thoughts in Solitude,” quoted in Through the Year with Thomas Merton, 156.)

This issue is particularly important in a world where machines speak.

The machines hear all our spoken and written words, yet lack the capacity to discriminate truth from lie. I find myself thinking of the android, Data, in one of the Star Trek series. A thinking machine, trying desperately to comprehend what it meant to be human. Often unable to understand. Now, in the real word, machines speak, and humans become the ones unable to discriminate truth from lie. Unable to understand.

We desperately need silence.

I learned long ago that Merton was right. Silence teaches us about reality. We won’t survive if we don’t find it.

I went some years ago on a three-day retreat at the monastery where Merton had lived and worked. I did not know what awaited me there. I arrived and learned my retreat would not involve any planned programming at all. I would simply live at the monastery and follow the rules the monks followed, although I would be free to either participate or abstain from participating in the various liturgies. The first rule. The most important rule. Silence. We were required to refrain from any speech except in one designated room or outdoors, on the monastery grounds.

We ate our meals in silence. Studied and prayed in our single rooms in silence. Walked to and from chapel in silence. We listened, of course, as the monks chanted the psalms, and mealtimes often featured the playing of a recording of something written long before by a contemplative, usually a message about prayer.

Most of the time, nothing to hear.

I had come to the monastery during a life crisis, the destruction of my first marriage. I had not come to find a solution, but rather because I wanted to understand what might be left for me in the world. I was wounded and broken.

Not a word was spoken concerning my crisis.

In less than two days, I found myself contemplating my own failures in marriage. My own grave mistakes. And I realized God loved me anyway. I found myself one late midnight lying on a cold stone floor, crying, at the feet of a statue of Jesus. He healed me.

I found peace in silence. Love. Renewal. Salvation. Hope. A future.

In three days, I learned to communicate with others without words. I found myself really seeing them, really comprehending them. One can say thank you with a gesture, with a glance. One can speak love without using his or her voice. So too joy and peace and hope.

Help me, O Lord, to become quiet in the land.



Hymn of the day: The Sound of Silence. Rossford UMC - Media.





Rev. Lawrence Keeler

05/28/2026

Thursday, May 28, 2026

Psalm 37: 1-5

1 Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; do not be jealous of those who do wrong.
2 For they shall soon wither like the grass, and like the green grass fade away.
3 Put your trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and feed on its riches.
4 Take delight in the Lord, and he shall give you your heart's desire.
5 Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, and he will bring it to pass.



Is prayer a word, either spoken or heard, or is it an action deriving from a word?

Abraham Heschel, who lost his entire family at Auschwitz, experienced anguish as he thought of a church adjoining the extermination camp. That church offered communion each day to the officers and guards who drove tens of thousands of people toward the gas chambers while starving and abusing countless others.

Were the prayers rising from that church real?

“Prayer should be a catharsis,” he wrote, “of purgation of emotion, as well as a means of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibilities. Prayer not verified by conduct is an act of desecration and blasphemy. Do not take a word of prayer in vain.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, Essential Writings, 145.)

In other words, our actions cannot ever refute a word of real prayer. Prayer will not be prayer unless it directs our choices and actions.

Too many people, it seems, choose wrongly while trying to pray fervently every day.

This is not a problem unique to Christians. Praying people of many faiths choose wrongly every day. Why? Perhaps they are too lazy to perceive truth. They might be somehow incapable of recognizing it, limited either in mental or emotional capacity. Their pain may blind them. Dismayed, they may find themselves unwilling to listen to the right words. Many seem incapable of understanding a word properly. This is how praying Christians and praying Moslems and praying Jews go about the work of killing each other every day, each one proclaiming righteousness. This is how human action goes awry.

Which of them should God hear? Which of them hear God? Who among them truly loves?

Dr. Heschel recognized how deeply we need prayer. We need it to escape from our emotions, to seek a way out of the turmoil all around us, to find even momentary peace.

We need to remember. Prayer is not just what we say. It is not just what we hear. It is also what we do. Lacking any of the three, a prayer becomes something less than prayer.



Hymn of the day: When Peace Like a River. Rossford UMC - Media.





Rev. Lawrence Keeler

05/27/2026

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Romans 9: 20-24

20But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” 21Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? 22What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction; 23and what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— 24including us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?



Prophets do not write of any future. They simply tell a truth which is true for all time.

Thus, it makes no difference if one listens to a saint from 2026 or 1400 or 2000 BC. Saints, like prophets, speak truth which, in turn speaks to every human in every time, no matter s*x, culture, ideology, philosophy, or religion. Saints work hard to see through, all the way to the bottom.

Too many people lose sight of the essential truth of Paul’s ministry. He believed and preached that God loves all people, desires to save all people, not just some specific group of chosen ones. He made a career of love by living among strangers. Different cultures. Different religions. Different politics.

It’s time for someone to tell the truth. No person has a right to tell another, “I am more than you. I am better than you. I am loved, and you are unloved.” Paradoxically, we must learn how to say, even to the worst among us, “You are beloved.”

Hear then a prophetic word, written in the late 1960s or early1970s, the era of Vietnam:

“One of our most important tasks today is to clear the atmosphere so that men can understand their plight without hatred, without fury, without desperation, and with a minimum of good will. A humble and objective seriousness is necessary for the long task of restoring mutual confidence and preparing the way for the necessary work of collaboration in building world peace. The restoration of a climate of relative sanity is perhaps more important than specific decisions regarding the morality of this or that strategy, this or that pragmatic policy.” (Thomas Merton, “Seeds of Destruction,” quoted in Through the Year With Thomas Merton, 155.)

Paul speaks of a truth which I struggled to understand for a long time. It’s an Old Testament truth: God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh, too, was God’s creation, and I struggled to understand how or why God would do such a thing.

Then I read a saint from the second century.

Origen spoke of a clay brick and a ball of beeswax. The sun, he said, shines equally on the clay brick and the wax. One grows harder, the other softer. The sun did not change. It was the same sun for both, yet the result differed.

God is love. For Pharaoh and for Moses. One grew harder, the other softer.

A great and wondrous secret lies in this odd paradox. If we comprehend it, we can begin to look with some small sense of love at even the worst among us. They too are beloved. We can begin to see God’s willingness to give his very life to save them. And we can learn to love them.

It’s time to try. Yet again. A truth for all of time.



Hymn of the day: Perhaps Love. Rossford UMC - Media.





Rev. Lawrence Keeler

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270 Dixie Highway
Rossford, OH
43460

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