Dear TCCBC church family,
Greetings in the Lord to you and your family! Pastors from all three congregations will be leading the Holy Communion this upcoming Lord’s Day on the first Sunday of May. You are all welcomed to join us. Please prepare the bread and the cup for yourselves ahead of time. You can consider using soda cracker if you do not have unleavened bread at home. God knows our heart. You can also prepare a cup of grape juice for yourself. Let us remember the shed blood and body that our Lord sacrificed for us, and worship Him in spirit and in truth this Sunday.
It has been a month and a half since the coronavirus shelter-in-place went into effect. We are saddened by the over three million infections, and more than two hundred thousand deaths worldwide. There are over a million people infected in the U.S., and over sixty-five thousand deaths. Here in California, about two thousand people have since passed away due to the coronavirus. I cannot imagine what these families must have been going through, and the magnitude of their emotional sadness and helplessness. Even solemn funerals for those who have passed away have become very difficult. Government regulations have limited the funeral attendees to a maximum of only ten. I know coming across such news everyday makes us feel bad and discouraged, hoping that through our prayers and supplications to our Lord, He would add grace and strength to us to endure this difficult time period. Because of anxiety caused by the continuous negative news, a medical expert in Taiwan suggested on TV that watching the pandemic news should be limited to less than an hour a day. In addition, if you or your family feel that you were being overly worried or having poorer tempers, you may consider consulting a psychologist. Under some circumstances, having appropriate prescribed medication can help manage emotional swings. But you must consult doctors and do not decide on your medication on your own. Seeking medical care is permitted by the shelter-in-place order.
If you regularly visit our church website, you may have noticed a number of updates to the web pages. We thank Roddy and Jonathan from the English congregation for their joint efforts on reorganizing the worship web pages. You can now access worship services from the past several Sundays on each congregation’s worship page. Selecting the worship service for a particular date will take you to the online worship content with information on the sermon title, key passage and the speaker. We hope the improvements will help you locate the worship content more conveniently. Below are the embedded links to the individual worship service web pages.
A few days ago, I received in the mail from a sister in Christ that I have known for a long time a hymn “By My Side Through the Darkest Night” that she had recorded. This hymn was written during the anguish time when this sister was recovering from a car accident about ten years ago. It was placed on YouTube, I believe for the first time, on 4/26/2020. I felt that not only the song was good, the lyrics were quite nice also. I would like to share with you here and hope that it will stay by your side also.
Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkS2XUogbWY
I have been writing to you these weekly communication letters during this unprecedented time. What do you think about them? I hope you have found them useful. I have another idea. Since these are “communication” letters, I would also like to have brothers and sisters “communicate” with me and with each other. Therefore, if you have any thoughts or questions, you can email them to me, and I can respond to you through the communication letters. You can share any topic, whether they are faith or family related, or life issues or questions. The questions you have are likely ones that other brothers and sisters share also. If you would like to stay anonymous, you can share by using a pen name. Let us encourage and support each other in Christ through this communication platform.
Supporting each other in Christ with you,
Pastor Job Lee, Senior Pastor
With fellow church leadership team
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