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Sunday Sermon

See the Power of the Lord Isaiah 52:10 The Lord will show his holy power to all the nations. Then everyone on earth will see the salvation of our God. Five years ago we choose to make a change in our lives. When most people are slowing down preparing to retire, we decided that buying land and build a house out on a gravel road would be a good idea. My wife and I both felt that we were called to this place and there is a sense of peace here but that is not all that is here. There is a garden that takes considerable effort to maintain and takes four people to just keep up with it. Each year at some point in the summer we process thirty or more meat chickens and it is a hot bloody mess. Even when it is fourteen degrees someone has to go feed and water the chickens and check for eggs. Let’s not even talk about cleaning the chicken coop. Why would we take on all of this work and think about doing more? What drives us to do things we never had considered before in our lives? It is...
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Sunday Sermon

 God of Peace Isaiah 52:7 How beautiful is the person who comes over the mountains to bring good news, who announces peace and brings good news, who announces salvation and says to Jerusalem, “Your God is King.”     Yesterday we had a refrigerator clean out day.  Over Christmas we had so much food and that created leftovers that were then put in containers and then placed in a refrigerator to be eaten later.  The eating later came yesterday and it was a good time.  It did create an issue for us, we had to wash and put away all those containers and that got me thinking about boxes and plastic bowls and all kinds of things that hold stuff and how useful they are.  Without some form of containment the world does not work.  Some of the first things humans created were baskets and boxes to hold things.  That kind of thinking then moved into the idea that we as humans are actually containers.  The idea of humans being vessels goes back a long ...
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Chain of Command AAR Battle of Kasserine Pass February 25, 1943.

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 Yesterday I went over to Pittsburgh to the Soldiers & Sailors Tabletop Gamers club to run a game of Chain of Command.  Paul Lawson invited me to come and run a game at the club’s Winterfest.  This club was new to me but it turns out I was acquainted with several of the people involved.      The club meets at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum Trust, Inc. in down town Pittsburgh.  There can not be enough said about this location.  It is both a museum and an event space.  The club meets in the paneled room filled with all of the CMH recipients for the state of Pennsylvania.  The building itself is wonderful but it is filled with some great historical material making it a place everyone should visit.     The club has a good cross section of both young and old and all of them interested in playing games and running them.  It was a delight to spend the few hours I did with the club members and I will mak...
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Suinday Sermon

  A Righteous God Isaiah 51:13 Have you forgotten the Lord who made you, who stretched out the skies and made the earth? Why are you always afraid of those angry people who trouble you and who want to destroy? But where are those angry people now? Our little homestead is in a battle with a very dangerous foe that I never thought of as anything more then a nuisance. This year we learned how destructive mice can be to everything. We have had mice chew through car parts and I think they ate more chicken feed then the chickens ate. Dealing with mice is a problem everyone has had but it never seemed to be a threat to us like is has been this year. The problem with mice is you don’t see them and when you do you only see one or two. And don’t even talk about how cute they are. There is a reason a mouse is the most famous image of a very large entertainment corporation. Mice just seem not to be a problem until they are because what you don’t see is the dozens of mice eating eve...
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 Here is how you fight a wagon fort.    
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Sunday Sermon

  Real Joy Isaiah 51:11 The people the Lord has freed will return and enter Jerusalem with joy. Their happiness will last forever. They will have joy and gladness, and all sadness and sorrow will be gone far away. As we officially enter the Christmas season we as believers begin a celebration of the birth of Jesus that is filled with real hope and abundant joy. At the same time I also want us to see that this hope and joy is not some mythical idea but it arrives through real struggle and difficulty. The glory of God is shown in the silence that is forced on Zechariah or the questions the Joseph has about what is going on. Think about Mary traveling during the last weeks of her pregnancy that must have been some hard days. What I want to say is that the hope and glory that the birth of Jesus brings was done in the real world with real problems and the daily battles of authentic humans. The hope we have does not happen because we don’t have trouble in our lives but precisely ...
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Sunday Sermon

  Good God Psalm 118:1 Thank the Lord because he is good. His love continues forever. A friend of our family lost her husband this year and the grief she feels is over whelming. When I think about the grief, she is suffering with I wonder why anyone would get that close to another person that they would have to deal with the pain of that loss. If you ask her why she would willingly endure such a fate, she would tell you the price of losing the man she loved was worth it because of the love she experienced for forty years. One of the side effects of love is sorrow and there is no avoiding it. Because of sin there can never be real love without the down side of heartache. That is what makes our God so amazing. God loves us and cares deeply for us. We are so blessed to have a God who loves us like He does. The lengths that our God will go to should make us weep with hope and joy. We need wisdom so God fills pages and pages of wisdom for us to learn from. But the most powerf...
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