Tomorrow = Big Day and Other Stuff

Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 23, is a big day for the Sims family and your prayers will be appreciated. We will be having our home inspected and will be interviewed for the purpose of having our grandchildren placed in our care. There are some other decisions involved as well. Forgive this foray into a blatantly personal request, but I appreciate your support.

Here is some other news.

I set up a couple of new blogs recently. Notably, Feeding Those Who Feed Us - San Joaquin (FeedTheValley.COM) is a recruiting, fund-raising, and prayer support page for the Feeding Those Who Feed Us project in Fresno, Madera, and Kings counties.

Baptist Temple, the Fellowship of Joy, is in the red financially. Curiously, this coincides with my new preaching series, "The Red Zone." It may take the rest of my life, but I am going to be preaching with a focus on the actual words of Jesus, the Old Testament passages He alludes to and the interpretation of His words in the epistles and apostle's preaching. The main focus will be the actual words which appear in many bibles as red print.

Why? We identify ourselves as followers of Jesus and, in some unique way, all scriptural and spiritual truth is subject to is interpretation, illustration, and application. So, I am going to live there for the next few years of my preaching.

The current mini-series piece of that is on the Temptations of Jesus.  They follow His baptism where he taught us to do the right thing for the right reason and the manifestation of the Spirit in the form of a dove making way for the words of the Father when He said, "This is my Son. I love Him. I am pleased with Him."

What greater motivation could we need.

After the dove came the desert, and in the desert, He found the devil.

So, it is about the dove, the devil, and the desert.

Picks from Tom is some material that I cleared off my MySpace profile to make room for other things. All of my Blogger blogs are listed in my Profile there.

I am relearning the value of one step at a time. It is about faith and faithfulness. It is about hope, optimism, and perseverance.  I do not understand why policies designed to help children are so proficient at victimizing them or why people who are dedicated and reasonable public servants can be so crippled and deadlocked by a system that is intended to empower them to do the right thing, but I know something that makes all of that of marginal importance.

At every turn, God is still in  charge of things and He can unravel our bureaucratic entanglements with but a word and that is what we are trusting Him to do and that is where our prayers gather for our little ones.