If you weren’t in the UMC of Westford this past Sunday, 8 Oct, you missed, in my opinion, one of Pastor Anne’s best sermons. If you missed it and want to read it, it is titled, Character Development. A lot of what I hear these days is that God loves us soooo much, we don’t have a worry in this world, or the next. We just have to sit back and wait for the love to rain down on us. But this sermon captures the love and power of God (“not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit”, says the Lord) while still recognizing that we have work to do too. And I think that is why I like this sermon so much; it recognizes that we have work to do. I won’t go into what it is we need to do, the sermon already does that very well. But I will just add one point. The sermon says, “It is not what you do, it is who you are.” The Bible says you are what you do (or more specifically, “You will know them by their fruits.”). But I also think you become what you do. Somewhere I heard this story about not so nice guy who fell in love with this very nice girl. So he pretended to be nice, like her, so that she would like him. And this went on for a long time. Eventually, he did get the girl. But more importantly, he spent so much time being nice, that he actually became nice. Or to steal a little bit from Forest Gump, ‘nice is as nice does’.