Good Service

I want to thank the Lord for a good service this morning. Kelley was prayed for during Sunday School and by the end of service let us know that God had healed her. I felt encouraged of the Lord and His prescence was with us.
We had two birthdays at our local church this past week. One was one of our gleaners turning 12. We had cake Tues. evening for both of them and I presented the new VLB, Emily Cox, with a certificate stating that she was officially inducted from the Gleaner Band to the Victory Leaders Band. I also gave her a VLB member card.
Sat. night we had a youth pizza and a movie night. Unfortunately, not as many showed up as we had planned on, but we had a good time anyway. We watched, "Facing the Giants". I would highly recommend this movie to anybody to watch. If you hadn't heard about it, it was filmed by a church in Georgia with an all volunteer cast. They filmed it with somewhere around $60,000-$100,000 and it ended up being picked up by a major studio and shown in theaters across the US. There is absolutely nothing objectionable in it. It is all about having faith in God and praising Him no matter what. It is the second time that Kelley and I watched it and I kept getting all kinds of sermon ideas out of it. One of the main points ended up being what I was going to preach on this morning. I had forgotten all about that part of the movie, but it helped confirm to me what the message should be about this morning. Then God confirmed it throughout the morning!
The weather up here has been great the past several days. Other than a lot of rain. It has been pretty warm. I love the spring, because then I can get out and start planting. Lord help me plant more spiritual seed this year as well.
Pray for us as we gear up for our Easter Service. In addition to our normal service, we will be having Anna's baby dedication afterward. We expect there to be a good number of people so we have rented a local auditorium for the morning service. Please pray that everything goes smoothly with all the visitors, setup and tear down, and that we will see souls saved!

Hope God is blessing where you are at!!

District Convention!

I just want to thank the Lord for a wonderful district convention. The Spirit was present in a mighty way. We experienced wonderful worship services as well as good preaching. At the very end of the convention we had one lady join the Church. We had 52 people registered, with 50 of those present Sat. Night. I meant to take pictures but was in an awkward place to get the ones I wanted Sat. night and then didn't get it done Sun. either. Oh well! If you would like to read more about it, I will be posting a report on our local church's website later today hopefully.
Last night, we cancelled our evening service, so Bro. Cox and I went and visited a local church that he has been associated with in the past. The people there were very loving. They didn't have a piano player, so I played piano with them during the worship service. Then they asked Bro. Cox to sing and following that asked me to sing. One thing that I noticed was that they seemed to be wanting to worship. They really didn't seem to be worried too much about how long they were there. Bro. Cox has preached for them in the past. Please pray that we continue to have an open door there as they currently do not have a pastor, and have not had one for a number of years. Pray that we can be a blessing to them whenever we get the opportunity to be in service with them.
Since beginning this post(several hours ago, got busy and walked away and forgot about it), I have learned that a dear friend has lost their father last night. Please pray for this family during this time, as the last that I knew he was not saved. I hope that since I have not spoken with them for some time that he had gotten saved in the interim. Please join me in prayer that God would provide peace during this time as this is the second family member they have lost within the past few months.

New Feature

Just wanted to let the few of you who read this occasionally know that you can now subscribe to this blog by filling out the email subscription form. It is located at the top left of the page. This will make it so that you don't have to come to this page to see if I have posted anything. Instead, it will be automatically sent to your email when I post. If everyone did this, it would save me a lot of time, since some of my friends, like me, blog sporadically. Hope this saves you some time. Or if you prefer you can prescribe in a reader.

God bless

Long Day

Well, I thank the Lord that He got us through the day safely. Today was little Anna's first of many all day travel for Church. We left for Evansville at 7:00 a.m. this morning to meet with the Loya's and have service with them. After arriving we spent some time visiting with them as I had not seen them in about 2 months and it had been longer for Kelley. Plus, this was the first time they had seen Anna. We read through the Sunday School lesson with them. We had one visitor, one of their son's friends who happened to stop by and wanted to play some basketball. Bro. David was quick to invite him to come to our upcoming District Convention as well as get him to stay for the Sunday School lesson. Bro. David and his family are very good and being outgoing and reaching out to the people around them. They are not afraid to invite people to church, no matter what the circumstances. Please pray for the work in this area. The one family that had shown a lot of interest is moving to Texas, so it has kind of been a little bit of a disappointment. But, I believe the Lord is working in other areas there in Evansville. I see good promise of things to come.
We were delayed leaving Evansville for a couple of hours due to a possibly bad situation, but thank the Lord after we left, we received a call letting us know that everything had turned out ok.
We then stopped to eat at a very good Amish Buffet Restuarant. They had the BEST homemade bread. And it went perfectly with all the other wonderful food they had. That is not even talking about all the desserts(peach cobbler, cherry cobbler, blackberry(I think) cobbler, as well as a number of different cakes, and several different kinds of pies.
We then headed down the road and stopped off at some friends' house, whom we had not seen for a number of months. It was good to spend time visiting with them.
Finally, we headed home and arrived at 10:00 p.m. That praying you did, Sis. Tammi, must have worked, because both Kelley and Anna did very good. There were a couple of times when I though Kelley would be ready to call it quits for the day, but she kept plugging along, and although tired, seemed to feel pretty good. Anna didn't fuss very much at all, until just a few min. before we got to our friends house, and for a few min. after we left their house. Hopefully, she can do just as good next weekend when we head back to S. IN for District Conv. and hopefully, to visit a few more friends if they are home.
Well, I guess, I better be done for now, and try to get to bed earlier than last night in case Lil' One decides that she wants to be up at 4:00 a.m. again.

Two sticks

In 1 Kings 17, there is the story of Elijah going to a widow, at God's
command, and as a result both Elijah, the widow, and her son were able
to survive a drought for many days. In this story we often talk about
God doing a miracle of producing many days worth of food on just a
handful of meal and a little oil. Oftentimes, I have though about how
small the cake would have been, but tonight, while Kelley was
preaching, as we read the verse something stuck out that really hadn't
before. The woman was gather TWO sticks to cook the cake, TWO. Now how
long could two burning sticks last? Not very long I would imagine.
Therefore, whatever she was going to cook had to be very small, to be
able to cook it with only two sticks.
I then began to think about
what a handful of meal is. As I ponder how much I can fit in my hand, I
come to the realization that it is not very much! And I have a fairly
big hand, one that iscomparatively large compared to most people I
know(with the exception of Bro. Forbes, his hand swallows mine). My
wife's hand is almost 1/2 the size of mine. I would imagine that this
woman's hand was much closer to my wife's than mine. This would shrink
the amount of meal even more.
As Kelley was preaching on our insufficiencies, this makes me think all the more on how even though the little that I have, if I just give it to God first, before I try to do anything with it, HE can do great things with it.
Some people might say that I am one stick short to have the fire that is needed, but with God's help I will accomplish all that He has for me to do. And you can too!

Visit

Thankfully, I will be able to start visiting my cousin again starting tomorrow. She just got saved last fall. She was moved a little over a month ago but is now able to have visits. Pray for her that she will stay encouraged and uplifted, throughout the rest of her time.

Goodbye Easy life!

Well, I guess that I can say goodbye to the easy life. And that is not just a reflection of newly becoming a father. For the past 4 1/2 weeks I have been laid-off from my secular day job. I received word today that I will be starting back Monday morning. In addition, at least 3 out of 4 of the next weekends I will have to be going out of town for at least part of the weekend. This weekend, we will be taking our first "long" trip since the baby. We will be headed to Evansville to have service and visit with the Loyas. It has been Dec. 30 since I have been there. We look forward to seeing them. This will be the first time that Kelley has gone with me. It will be Anna's first car ride over 45 min. Hopefully, if we time the feedings right, everything will go smoothly. We plan to meet up with some friends other than the Loyas as well. Afterwards, we are planning on stopping by some friends' house that we have not seen for several months. So, it will probably be a very tiring day for Kelley and Anna. It will be nice, in some ways, not to be driving for that long by myself. Please pray that we have a safe trip and that I don't drive Kelley crazy.
Over the next few weeks, we have district convention, a youth event at our house, possibly one more trip to Evansville for me, and possibly a trip to Cincinnati for a church event at our "adopted" family's church. I am also planning on ramping up my visiting. I have not done very good at getting out for a while.
All of this will be culminated by Easter. I anticipate having a large crowd because 1)baby dedication and 2)Easter. We will be renting an auditorium at a local college. This will create some extra work, ok actually a lot of extra work. But, I highly doubt we could fit everyone here at the house, where we normally have service. I still have to work out if we are going to have an Egg hunt and where to have it. Hopefully, I will get things ironed out with everyone tomorrow night as to whether or not we are going to have it. Then I can work Friday on making arrangements for it.
It is a shame that I have had all this time off and not gotten very much, if anything done, and now that I have to go back to work, everything needs to be done. Oh well, that's how it goes I guess.
May the Lord bless and keep you.

Smaller is better, sometimes!

It is said by those that know me that I am a reader. My dear friend and adopted father(after my father died) has said more than once that if you want me to know something, write it on a piece of paper and stick it in front of me. While the blogs that I love to read the most are my friends and others in the Church describing how God is working and blessing where they are, I do also read a variety of other blogs, spiritual and non-spiritual alike. I have found that the non-spiritual often have content that can be applied to the spiritual. One that I often read is one written by someone named Seth Godin. He is an author and speaker in the area of business. Many times the ideas he writes about, have applications in the spiritual sense, at least in my mind. The last two entries have made me think about a couple of different things.
The first that I came across was this one. It talks about how everyone wants to be in the big markets. Is this not true in our work in the Church? Everyone wants to have a large church. Now don't misunderstand, I know that God wants us to grow. And I by no means believe that God wants us to remain small. But, if you have a smaller church, it is insane to try and keep up with the mega churches. Our jobs are to work where we are at. A smaller church has many things to offer that I see no way a mega church can. One instance that I can think of is that in a smaller church if you miss a service, you are missed. In a church of thousands, how can one be missed? Now maybe there is something I am missing, but I just don't see how it can be done. I am not being critical of mega churches, just saying that smaller churches offer an intimacy that cannot really be duplicated in a mega setting. We must work where God puts us.
In one way, I don't see The Church of God ever getting to the point where this would be a problem. Our practice usually, is that whenever we get a large church, some people from that church start a new church in another location, thus making the previous congregation a little smaller, until it grows a little more. This creates many smaller centers of outreach in the middle of number of communities, instead of one large center in the middle of one community.
Another post that Seth had most recently, here, talks about companies hiding things that they feel consumers would not want to know. Do we ever do this in the Church? Do we ever gloss over things that we think would make people turn away? In his post, he goes on to say that people will eventually find out the secrets anyway. We know that this is completely true. This is biblical. So why waste time and energy hiding anything. It is useless, and if you are like me, you don't have time to waster. On top of that it would be hypocritical and dishonest. That is certainly not the first impression that we want to give people is it? Let us just focus on helping people and telling them about Christ. Let us just give them the truth.
Hopefully, I have made somewhat clear the track that these posts have made my mind follow. I have neither the time nor the space to explain in full, but hopefully this will spark something in your mind and heart as well.

God bless