Friday September 25

Tim and myself have been busy soaking up God's creation! It's been terrific, but it's been my toughest week to stay focused. And lack of focus is not a good thing when you're supposed to cover 75 verses in 45 minutes. Verse by verse is impossible and impractical, but it's tough deciding where we will spend the majority of our time. But I think I've decided on that, but there is a lot of wiggle room if I do decide to change.

I've noticed that before I came up here I relied to much on Powerpoint as my outline. I'd have a general outline, put it into powerpoint and preach from that...Up here I have Sewell's projector, but I've refused to use it since the brethren do not normally have that luxury. And Sunday morning I am using a sermon that I wrote knowing that I was going to have PowerPoint...and that allowed me to put more verses into the sermon and yet still be able to give the context. Well, that's produces a potential problem here since some do not know the books of the Bible very well, and I'm afraid I'll go to fast. So I'm having to decide things like: "how important to the overall idea is this verse?" "Can I make the same point without using this verse?" "What is this verse adding to the sermon?" Just little things like that.

I've concluded that I need to keep almost all of the verses so that poses another challenge: how do I present this effeciently and effectively? I have not worked that kink out yet, but that's where I stand at 3:00 pm on Friday..

I need to finish this relatively soon because we have our bi-weekly Bible study with Larry Bailey tonight at the Mallory's. Plus, I won't have a lot of time tomorrow to do "actual" work since I will be driving 2.5 hours to Mt. Marcy (the highest point in NY) to summit the mountain. I will have plenty of meditation time, but no time to sit at my machine and work on a physical outline.

I'm really exited about the next couple of hours. Study tonight, hike tomorrow, dinner at Tia's home with Tim and other Christians. Class, sermon and pot luck on Sunday. It will be a great weekend if the Lord allows it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and worship on Sunday!

God bless,

Wes