Hilltop Baptist Church, to which I belong, has been praying for revival, preparing for revival, and trusting God to bring revival. We’ve been inviting friends, handing out cards and tracts, and sharing with just about everyone we come in contact with. I had a handful of cards that the pastor had given me this morning – about 10. I slid each one into a gospel tract and we headed to…
For the past ten years, I’ve been discipling a good friend. Although she’s been saved for more than twenty years and has sat under the teaching of God’s word that entire time, she has allowed her spiritual growth to be delayed by circumstances. As a result, she’s still young in the Lord. So she is always asking the kind of questions that a baby Christian might ask. One day she…
It’s amazing what God can do through a yielded vessel. A couple of weeks ago, our church celebrated “Homecoming,” which is the anniversary of its founding. With concern for the lost, recognizing a need, and expanding on a vision from God, First Baptist Church of Fairfield, Ohio, started the work on January 16, 1966, and Hilltop Baptist Church was born. Her first pastor was Jack Wren. Hilltop Baptist Church has…
A few weeks ago I realized my website had been attacked by malware and other Internet creepy crawly things that infiltrate your site to destroy it. So I called my IPage (that’s my hosting site) technical support team and said, “Help! There’s a creepy crawly thing on my site and I can’t get it off.” Actually, it wasn’t really creeping and crawling. It was just a link that didn’t belong…
Recently, my daughter Jamie was having severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, and such shortness of breath she could hardly sit up. Any physical activity, no matter how minor, exhausted her. Just folding a load of laundry made it difficult for her to breathe. She couldn’t seem to sit up for more than half an hour. And every day her symptoms got progressively worse. She got in with the doctor several…
With ISIS on the warpath, driving families from their homes, the Arabs firing rockets into Israel and Israel returning fire, people in the Middle East are suffering tremendously. Many of these people don’t know what it’s like to live without fear. Fear of rockets flying by. Fear of bombs exploding around them. Fear for their safety. Fear that a loved one will be killed. They struggle to find food and…
Isaiah 55:8 says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” God’s ways are not our ways, so we don’t always understand why things happen the way they do. In June of 1994, Floyd landed in the hospital on the verge of a massive heart attack. After a series of tests, they did an angioplasty on him, which opened a blocked artery,…
When I was in high school, I had a friend who never let me finish a sentence. Now my mother had taught me not to interrupt, and it took me years to internalize that lesson. And by high school, I had learned that lesson well. So when Lynn interrupted me, I stopped talking and let her say what she wanted. Once she was through, I continued, but the moment I…
My entire life I’ve battled poor equilibrium. At age 3, I was hospitalized to find out why I wasn’t walking. When I was 12, my balance was so bad I could not stand still. I had to keep moving to keep from falling over; kind of like a guy on a unicycle. I served in the military but couldn’t march because of my balance. Then I got married and had…
For the majority of my children’s lives, I was a stay-at-home mom. So I was almost always there. But my daughter, Jamie, didn’t have that same luxury. She had to work to survive, to help pay bills, to help make ends meet. And I was the most affordable childcare provider available to her. She did, in fact, pay me to watch her two little boys, although I considered it more…