Please also pray for the evacuees who have had to leave everything behind – especially those who lost everything and will have to begin over from scratch. Please also pray that adequate mental health and spiritual support is made available to those who have been through so much – especially the very young, the very old and those who are already struggling with mental health issues and physical handicaps.

Please also pray a mighty blessing on all the volunteers and those who have given so generously. Our community is encouraging local people to join forces with the coordinated efforts which Beulah Alliance Church in Edmonton is giving leadership to. It is so hard to figure out what to do and not feel so helpless when these kinds of disasters strike.

With all that is going on around us, we are still counting down the Omer towards our community celebration of Shavuot (Pentecost) in June. Living a festival driven life according to the Scriptures is the best way to ride out any storms or duldrums which life can throw at you!

I will be speaking next Shabbat about the meaning of this counting down of the Omer. Once our people were out of Egyptian territory, they had to keep going in their pilgrimage until they arrived at the mountain to receive the Word and spend a year getting ready to enter the Promised Land.

Their journey from Egypt to the mountain took 49 days – nearly three million people do not move very quickly! Once we come to faith we have to keep moving until our lives are ready to receive the Word and make all the changes and paradigm shifts which integrating G-d’s Word into our lives requires.

Spiritual growth and success does not depend on the absence of trials, but on learning to relate to this unreliable world from the Kingdom mandate which the Scriptures teach. May all of you find this release and this support as we work our way through another festival cycle, cause there ain’t no life like it!

Shalom,

Rabbi Mike