You've heard the old story of the frog who gets put in room temperature water and doesn't notice the incremental changes once the water is heated and therefore dies. I don't even know if that's what would happen, but I do know that as humans, we have difficulty realizing the slow societal changes around us and how they might actually affect us. In my time with the Lord th...

Recently I was reading about lobsters. I learned that lobsters never stop growing. The largest one caught was in Nova Scotia, Canada. It weighed 45 pounds. They are known to live 45 to 50 years. In contrast to the lobster, I thought about starfish (although they technically are not a fish). Some species of starfish canregeneratelost arms and can regrow an entire new limb ...

Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another with love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.Ephesians 4:1,2 In my time with the Lord this morning, this verse hit me hard. I t...

"But Naaman was furious and went away and said, "Indeed! I thought 'He would at least come out to [see] me and stand and call on the name of the Lordhis God, and wave his hand over the place [of leprosy] and heal the leper.' " II Kings 5:11 Naaman really stuck out to me in my reading this week. He was highly regarded by his King. He was a successful supreme commander of t...

This week I was with our granddaughters who love for people to read books to them. So, as they pulled out the books they wanted me to read to them we came to a book that had a page torn and was missing in the middle of the book. I asked the one I was reading to "what happened to the page? Who ripped the page out of the book?" She looked at me and took a few minutes and the...

https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/stop-and-smell-sebum What an unpleasant thought. Just reading the title brings to the mind an unpleasant sensation. If it is any consolation, I share this odor with approximately a million people in the USA. Permit me to explain. Researchers at the University of Manchester in England are reporting on a biological signature that makes up a...

2 Chronicles 22:4He did evil in the sight of the Lord like the house of Ahab, for they were his counselors after the death of his father, to his destruction. In my time with the Lord this morning I was in 2 Chronicles 22 where Ahaziah takes leadership as King. He makes the fatal mistake of getting bad counsel which ends up costing him his life. We may think we would neve...

This week I read a narrative that a brother in Christ had put out on social media, and while attempting to get his point across, it was riddled with vulgar and offensive words. My first flinch was disgust and being broken hearted about what so many would read and think. I was probably more disgusted about what man may think, disregarding what God thinks. During my time in ...

This may seem strange that I am not pointing to a specific verse in the book of Numbers from what I am hearing from the LORD but there is a theme through the first 17 chapters that The LORD is hitting me with. COMPLAINING --- COMPLAINING --- COMPLAINING Am I ever satisfied with my circumstances? Do I want to go back to the way things were? Only if-----------? You fill in...

For the year 2021 we have chosen to focus on innovation as we pursue our essentials to make disciples. Our simple working definition of innovation is Trying Something New. We chose that term considering what we are facing with COVID-19. The author, Mick Murray, explains it this way: "Trying to lead an organization in this increasing VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ...