Have you seen it?
Have you felt it?
Have you heard it?
Have you sensed it?
What is it???
Did someone tell you about it?
Did you overhear friends talking about it?
Did you say something to your friends about it?
What is it???
There definitely is a strong new sense of “Passionate Transformation” going on around church these days.
You can see it in the new Pastor’s grin and his son’s competitive spirit in the games at the Fourth of July Party and at our first night of Vacation Bible School last night at the “Shake It Up Café”. You hear it in the voices of many of the staff as that talk about some of the futures they Hope to bring to fruition. You feel it in Rod’s messages about his Faith Journey and our Mission as Disciples.
We are beginning anew, a fresh new start with a wonderful facility, and now we must develop and support missions and ministries that enable us to reach out and touch others and begin living our Mission of “Transforming lives through Christ …”
Dear God,
I know that I have grown complacent and apathetic, reluctant to volunteer, truly just a bit tired of the continuing challenges that we all faced with the Capital Campaign and the amazing transformation of our church facility.
But now I renew my commitment to you and the entire congregation here at Gashland UMC. And, I prayer that you touch everyone’s heart here to do the same. Let them all sense the feelings of re-birth in their Spirits and find the inner strength to step out to share their Love of God as You have commanded each of us.
Wow, it was really great to see the sanctuary so full Sunday morning at first service. We thank God for the blessing of Rod McNeall as our new Pastor and his family and know that those very same blessings are with Paul and Linda Lanning and their new church family.
A new beginning has begun and we all must trust in God that tomorrow will bring us challenges, responsibilities and eternal blessings.
Bright Start Preschool is ready to start another great year. Teachers report back to work on August 30 with students starting on September 7th. The halls will be filled with laughing preschoolers!
We only have 5 more openings! Stop by and see all the good things happening in the preschool hall!
On my way in to work the other day, I was listening to a podcast by the authors of Freakonomics. If you’ve never heard of them, they have written a couple of books about the implications of using purely economic criteria in our daily lives (and how economic factors play into aspects of life we never thought about). Interesting reading, but I didn’t always agree with it. Money on its’ own is amoral and we are moral creatures.
Anyway, the story told during the podcast had to do with the analogy of typical music radio stations and classroom teaching. The point was that neither rarely succeed for all people because both aim right down the middle to please/educate as many people as possible.
If you’ve never heard of Pandora.com (http://www.pandora.com), it’s a web site that allows you to build and continually customize your own music station, which you listen to on their web site. They have you start with songs or artists you like and they present similar songs and artists that you may or may not have heard of, but who have musical attributes similar to the songs you have indicated you like. You always have the option to tell Pandora to never play a specific song again, so if the system picks a song that is wrong for you, you have only to click a button and away it goes.
The New York City school system currently graduates just over 60% of its’ students from high school. This is lower than the national average, but that average is only 70%. Think of it – 3 of 10 students who start in school will not graduate from high school. The NYC school system is in the early phases of evaluating a new program called the ‘School of One’ (http://schools.nyc.gov/community/innovation/SchoolofOne/default.htm).
The purpose of the School of One is to present materials in a variety of modalities – ways of receiving information. The School of One has typical group learning options, smaller groups, online tutoring and even self-paced options so that students are put into situations in which they learn best. The students are tested at the end of each day so the School of One system can evaluate which method(s) are working and for whom, and to build the next day’s study plan.
“How does any of this fit with Gashland?” you are probably asking. I don’t want to over-simplify this point, but it seems to me that there is a lot of concern about changes to worship and how they will impact us and the church. Change is often times scary, but scary or not, change should always prompt questions, especially the question “Why?” In this case, I think we need to consider the various ways in which people can be in genuine worship of God and what we as a congregation can do to help them do that.
Whether we think of worship as something for which different approaches may be the best or not, the fact is that we are all individuals, each of us fearfully and wonderfully made by God (Psalm 139:14) to be in relationship with Him. Some of us like to read, some like movies, some like classical music, some rock, some country, and some people like rap. Whether you like something personally or not doesn’t mean it has no worth or isn’t of benefit to someone. I personally don’t care for rap music in general, but I have a good friend who is a Christian rap artist. In fact, he performed at the Rock the Light festival a few years ago. He and his wife went from living in their car to finding the Lord through the Salvation Army and He turned their lives around. The type of music that touches him didn’t change though, so he is working to change the message that music carries. He will freely admit there are a lot of anti-Christian messages in that style of music, but that statement is true to some extent for all kinds of music.
Let me give you an example of this: the story in the song is of a woman who desires to marry against the wishes of her parents. They have picked a man for her and have arranged a marriage with the man of their choice. After some twists and turns, as part of her punishment for running away, she ends up drugged and while drugged marries a donkey. The song contains this line – “When in that moment, so it came to pass, Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.” Not exactly a great example of the covenant of marriage, right? Well, we play that song at almost every wedding (including Sandra’s and mine) as the bride makes her entrance to the church. It’s from The Wedding March by Mendelssohn. He wrote it to accompany Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer-Night’s Dream’. Like I said, we used this at our wedding, even though my father asked that we not, because of the original purpose of the song. We like the music, however, so we have it played.
It’s not the style of music that is offensive, it’s the words associated with the music that help point us towards God or away from Him.
We need to move away from talking and thinking about providing the one “best” way to worship, and consider additional genuine ways to worship. Maybe we try one new thing or four new things – the point is that we need to start these new things by figuring out ways in which we can introduce our neighbors to Christ, rather than starting with what we don’t want to change. Maybe the best way to reach some of our neighbors isn’t through a worship service at all. Maybe it’s through plain old service – from us to them.
I personally prefer more traditional worship services, but my personal preference doesn’t make other services invalid. I want Gashland to continue to offer traditional services, but I also believe we need to explore additional service types to help grow the kingdom of God.
So here we are, at yet another crossroads, wanting to make the right decision to help our portion of the Body of Christ go in the direction God wants, but having to do so without a sign obvious to all as to what that direction is. All we do know for sure is that we are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and also to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matt. 22:37-39).
Boy, I thought Paul’s message Sunday was absolutely right on target. His analogy with the stagecoach passenger classes really hit home for me. Each of us must now decide whether we want to be first class, second class or third class Disciples.
God called us to love him, love others and be his hands and feet here on earth and I think the only way that we can do that is by being involved and actively working in some form of GUMC ministries.
This book has changed my life. It was hard work but hope you can read and recommend it.
Have you heard about John Wesley? Do you like reading about John Wesley? Are you interested in John Wesley’s theology?
Are you interested in what John Wesley thought about the Roman Catholics? How about the Quakers? Did you know that he wrote about the Deists and the Mystics and compared their thinking with that of his “True Christianity?” He also wrote about the relationships between Judaism and Christianity.
John Wesley was a very ecumenical thinker holding together many views that apparently are opposed to each other. We should be proud of our founder.
The book “John Wesley, Natural Man, and the ‘Isms’” written by J. Robert (Bob) Ewbank, discusses all of these issues and more.
Written for the layperson as well as the scholar, there is a Study Guide in the back of the book to help individual or group study. The Guide has questions in the front, which are answered later in the Guide.
Bob has a B.A. from Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas and an M.A. from Garrett-Evangelical. He is currently Lay Leader of St. Mark UMC, in Mobile, AL.
Bishop Rueben P. Job of the United Methodist Church has written some kind words on the back cover.
Sam Royappa District Superintendent of the Coulee District in Wisconsin has recommended this book to his clergy and laity.
A review of the book has also been published in the October 15, 2009 copy of The Laity Link which is the newsletter of the Alabama-West Florida Conference Board of Laity. It is also been written up in “The Rainbow,” the magazine of Delta Tau Delta, The “Aware” magazine of Garrett-Evangelical and the Baker University magazine “Baker World.”
The book has been used by a local Sunday School in its entirety and quoted in others.
To find the book go on the internet to:
1. http://www.wipfandstock.com (Wipf and Stock)
2. The book is now available at Cokesbury, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, WJE at Yale (The Jonathan Edwards Center), Kalahari.net, Paddyfield.com,www.deepershopping.com, Booktopia, abdbooksellers.com; Christianbooksbibles.com, IBS.it, Webster.it, Bibleknowledgebookstore.com, Angus & Robertson.com.au, JabezChristianStore.com, Boonbridgebooks.com, Alibris.com, Infibeam, and Amazon.com among others.
One of our very own members embarks on a Spirit fill journey this evening. God is using Terry Thomas to lead a group of men on the Walk to Emmaus weekend. Please be in prayer for Terry and all the men involved this weekend. Pray there eye will be opened and they will see the face of Christ in those around them and they have this experience together.
Just finished a 10 week study here at GUMC of the book of “Esther” with twelve amazing ladies. It is a Beth Moore study and in case you don’t know about her she is a great Christian woman sharing her faith thru video and journals or study books. You might want to check in from time to time with us to see if this group is ready to begain another study of hers or some other study. Would love to have you join us. This group does meet during the day.
May God be with you every day as you walk with him.
The Bright Start preschoolers really enjoyed playing on the new playground yesterday. Thank you to everyone involved for showing
God’s love by being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.
Here’s the scoop…we have two new staff members to direct our music. It won’t be officially announced until Easter Sunday…but bloggers hear it first.
Today (Saturday) Pastor Parish Committee hired CORTNEY CAMPOS to be the Director of Special Music. Her task will be to coordinate all “Specials” at all worship services. This will include leading the choir, coordinating small music groups and soloists. She will start on April 1st.
You will remember Cortney as an Intern at Gashland UMC last fall as she was directing choir. She is a Senior at UMKC majoring in music and social work. She will also continuing working for Zales Jewelry at Metro North. More information will follow about choirs and rehearsals…but when you see her, welcome Cortney BACK to the staff.
THOMAS MYERS will join the staff as Director of Comtemporary Music. Thomas comes with a great list of music accomplishments. He is a composer and perfomer of Christian Music; accomplished guitar, keyboard and various other instruments.
Thomas spent two years in a prestigous music school in New York before transferring baqck to UMKC Conservatory of Music where he is a senior music performance and compostion major. He will aslo be working at Banana Republic on the Plaza.
Thomas will begin work and rehearsals on April 1st with the first Praise Team around mid-May or so.
I was reading a Lenten meditation over lunch today and came across the following. It struck me because Jim and Andrea Hunter had asked for prayers last night for Juneitta, who has since passed on. I thought of sending this just to them, but perhaps someone else needs to hear this as well.
“We all must die. And we will all die alone. No one can make that final journey with us. We have to let go of what is most our own and trust that we did not live in vain. Somehow, dying is the greatest of all human moments because it is the moment in which we are asked to give everything. The way we die has not only much to do with the way we have lived, but also with the way that those who come after us will live. Jesus’ death reveals to us that we do not have to live pretending that death is not something that comes to all of us. As his hands stretched out between heaven and earth, he asks us to look our mortality straight in the face and trust that death does not have the last word. We can then look at the dying in our world and give them hope; we can hold their dying bodies in our arms and trust that mightier arms than ours will receive them and give them the peace and joy they always desire.
In dying, all of humanity is one. And it was into this dying humanity that God entered so as to give us hope.”
Henri Nouwen, “Walk with Jesus”
We talked in our study last night about the costs of deciding to follow Jesus. One of those costs is to love each other enough to hurt when they hurt.
The transition from this life to the next is indeed something we have to do by ourselves, but it is up to each of us to remind those still here that they are not alone. Each of us is still on our journey – may we find the strength to help each other through the times of sorrow that will come up in our lives.
I was driving in to work this morning, the roads were wet from the light snow that was falling, just thinking about how I would like to be back home in bed. I suspected that most everyone on the roads at that time probably pretty much had the same thought. Work can sure be a nuisance.
But, then early in the morning I received an email from an old friend that I worked with at a previous employer, American Nurses Association down by Crown Center in the early 1990s and he indicated that he was currently unemployed and looking for a position. Steve was a good man, in fact he was my boss at ANA.
It was then that I realized that God has always been with me in all of my various positions, and has always provided me with excellent opportunities for growth, for learning, for failure and for success. I must say also, that God also was with me when he placed my wife Cheryl in my life, as she has been with me in all of these various job changes as well.
Thanks be to God.
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Services
We meet for worship every Sunday 8:15am and 10:45am
Lee said:
Have you seen it?
Have you felt it?
Have you heard it?
Have you sensed it?
What is it???
Did someone tell you about it?
Did you overhear friends talking about it?
Did you say something to your friends about it?
What is it???
There definitely is a strong new sense of “Passionate Transformation” going on around church these days.
You can see it in the new Pastor’s grin and his son’s competitive spirit in the games at the Fourth of July Party and at our first night of Vacation Bible School last night at the “Shake It Up Café”. You hear it in the voices of many of the staff as that talk about some of the futures they Hope to bring to fruition. You feel it in Rod’s messages about his Faith Journey and our Mission as Disciples.
We are beginning anew, a fresh new start with a wonderful facility, and now we must develop and support missions and ministries that enable us to reach out and touch others and begin living our Mission of “Transforming lives through Christ …”
Dear God,
I know that I have grown complacent and apathetic, reluctant to volunteer, truly just a bit tired of the continuing challenges that we all faced with the Capital Campaign and the amazing transformation of our church facility.
But now I renew my commitment to you and the entire congregation here at Gashland UMC. And, I prayer that you touch everyone’s heart here to do the same. Let them all sense the feelings of re-birth in their Spirits and find the inner strength to step out to share their Love of God as You have commanded each of us.
In Jesus name we prayer.
Amen
Lee said:
Wow, it was really great to see the sanctuary so full Sunday morning at first service. We thank God for the blessing of Rod McNeall as our new Pastor and his family and know that those very same blessings are with Paul and Linda Lanning and their new church family.
A new beginning has begun and we all must trust in God that tomorrow will bring us challenges, responsibilities and eternal blessings.
Linda Wansing said:
Bright Start Preschool is ready to start another great year. Teachers report back to work on August 30 with students starting on September 7th. The halls will be filled with laughing preschoolers!
We only have 5 more openings! Stop by and see all the good things happening in the preschool hall!
Greg Rackers said:
What if one size doesn’t fit all?
On my way in to work the other day, I was listening to a podcast by the authors of Freakonomics. If you’ve never heard of them, they have written a couple of books about the implications of using purely economic criteria in our daily lives (and how economic factors play into aspects of life we never thought about). Interesting reading, but I didn’t always agree with it. Money on its’ own is amoral and we are moral creatures.
Anyway, the story told during the podcast had to do with the analogy of typical music radio stations and classroom teaching. The point was that neither rarely succeed for all people because both aim right down the middle to please/educate as many people as possible.
If you’ve never heard of Pandora.com (http://www.pandora.com), it’s a web site that allows you to build and continually customize your own music station, which you listen to on their web site. They have you start with songs or artists you like and they present similar songs and artists that you may or may not have heard of, but who have musical attributes similar to the songs you have indicated you like. You always have the option to tell Pandora to never play a specific song again, so if the system picks a song that is wrong for you, you have only to click a button and away it goes.
The New York City school system currently graduates just over 60% of its’ students from high school. This is lower than the national average, but that average is only 70%. Think of it – 3 of 10 students who start in school will not graduate from high school. The NYC school system is in the early phases of evaluating a new program called the ‘School of One’ (http://schools.nyc.gov/community/innovation/SchoolofOne/default.htm).
The purpose of the School of One is to present materials in a variety of modalities – ways of receiving information. The School of One has typical group learning options, smaller groups, online tutoring and even self-paced options so that students are put into situations in which they learn best. The students are tested at the end of each day so the School of One system can evaluate which method(s) are working and for whom, and to build the next day’s study plan.
“How does any of this fit with Gashland?” you are probably asking. I don’t want to over-simplify this point, but it seems to me that there is a lot of concern about changes to worship and how they will impact us and the church. Change is often times scary, but scary or not, change should always prompt questions, especially the question “Why?” In this case, I think we need to consider the various ways in which people can be in genuine worship of God and what we as a congregation can do to help them do that.
Whether we think of worship as something for which different approaches may be the best or not, the fact is that we are all individuals, each of us fearfully and wonderfully made by God (Psalm 139:14) to be in relationship with Him. Some of us like to read, some like movies, some like classical music, some rock, some country, and some people like rap. Whether you like something personally or not doesn’t mean it has no worth or isn’t of benefit to someone. I personally don’t care for rap music in general, but I have a good friend who is a Christian rap artist. In fact, he performed at the Rock the Light festival a few years ago. He and his wife went from living in their car to finding the Lord through the Salvation Army and He turned their lives around. The type of music that touches him didn’t change though, so he is working to change the message that music carries. He will freely admit there are a lot of anti-Christian messages in that style of music, but that statement is true to some extent for all kinds of music.
Let me give you an example of this: the story in the song is of a woman who desires to marry against the wishes of her parents. They have picked a man for her and have arranged a marriage with the man of their choice. After some twists and turns, as part of her punishment for running away, she ends up drugged and while drugged marries a donkey. The song contains this line – “When in that moment, so it came to pass, Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.” Not exactly a great example of the covenant of marriage, right? Well, we play that song at almost every wedding (including Sandra’s and mine) as the bride makes her entrance to the church. It’s from The Wedding March by Mendelssohn. He wrote it to accompany Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer-Night’s Dream’. Like I said, we used this at our wedding, even though my father asked that we not, because of the original purpose of the song. We like the music, however, so we have it played.
It’s not the style of music that is offensive, it’s the words associated with the music that help point us towards God or away from Him.
We need to move away from talking and thinking about providing the one “best” way to worship, and consider additional genuine ways to worship. Maybe we try one new thing or four new things – the point is that we need to start these new things by figuring out ways in which we can introduce our neighbors to Christ, rather than starting with what we don’t want to change. Maybe the best way to reach some of our neighbors isn’t through a worship service at all. Maybe it’s through plain old service – from us to them.
I personally prefer more traditional worship services, but my personal preference doesn’t make other services invalid. I want Gashland to continue to offer traditional services, but I also believe we need to explore additional service types to help grow the kingdom of God.
So here we are, at yet another crossroads, wanting to make the right decision to help our portion of the Body of Christ go in the direction God wants, but having to do so without a sign obvious to all as to what that direction is. All we do know for sure is that we are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and also to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matt. 22:37-39).
Lee said:
Boy, I thought Paul’s message Sunday was absolutely right on target. His analogy with the stagecoach passenger classes really hit home for me. Each of us must now decide whether we want to be first class, second class or third class Disciples.
God called us to love him, love others and be his hands and feet here on earth and I think the only way that we can do that is by being involved and actively working in some form of GUMC ministries.
J. Robert Ewbank said:
This book has changed my life. It was hard work but hope you can read and recommend it.
Have you heard about John Wesley? Do you like reading about John Wesley? Are you interested in John Wesley’s theology?
Are you interested in what John Wesley thought about the Roman Catholics? How about the Quakers? Did you know that he wrote about the Deists and the Mystics and compared their thinking with that of his “True Christianity?” He also wrote about the relationships between Judaism and Christianity.
John Wesley was a very ecumenical thinker holding together many views that apparently are opposed to each other. We should be proud of our founder.
The book “John Wesley, Natural Man, and the ‘Isms’” written by J. Robert (Bob) Ewbank, discusses all of these issues and more.
Written for the layperson as well as the scholar, there is a Study Guide in the back of the book to help individual or group study. The Guide has questions in the front, which are answered later in the Guide.
Bob has a B.A. from Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas and an M.A. from Garrett-Evangelical. He is currently Lay Leader of St. Mark UMC, in Mobile, AL.
Bishop Rueben P. Job of the United Methodist Church has written some kind words on the back cover.
Sam Royappa District Superintendent of the Coulee District in Wisconsin has recommended this book to his clergy and laity.
Dennis Mohler, District Superintendent of the Foothills District in Ohio also comments on the book at http://www.foothillsdistrict.org/newsletter/october
The book is found on the Newcastle Methodist Church site at http://www.newcastlemethodist.org.uk.
A review of the book has also been published in the October 15, 2009 copy of The Laity Link which is the newsletter of the Alabama-West Florida Conference Board of Laity. It is also been written up in “The Rainbow,” the magazine of Delta Tau Delta, The “Aware” magazine of Garrett-Evangelical and the Baker University magazine “Baker World.”
The book has been used by a local Sunday School in its entirety and quoted in others.
To find the book go on the internet to:
1. http://www.wipfandstock.com (Wipf and Stock)
2. The book is now available at Cokesbury, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, WJE at Yale (The Jonathan Edwards Center), Kalahari.net, Paddyfield.com,www.deepershopping.com, Booktopia, abdbooksellers.com; Christianbooksbibles.com, IBS.it, Webster.it, Bibleknowledgebookstore.com, Angus & Robertson.com.au, JabezChristianStore.com, Boonbridgebooks.com, Alibris.com, Infibeam, and Amazon.com among others.
Bini Hamilton said:
One of our very own members embarks on a Spirit fill journey this evening. God is using Terry Thomas to lead a group of men on the Walk to Emmaus weekend. Please be in prayer for Terry and all the men involved this weekend. Pray there eye will be opened and they will see the face of Christ in those around them and they have this experience together.
Bev Shepherd said:
Just finished a 10 week study here at GUMC of the book of “Esther” with twelve amazing ladies. It is a Beth Moore study and in case you don’t know about her she is a great Christian woman sharing her faith thru video and journals or study books. You might want to check in from time to time with us to see if this group is ready to begain another study of hers or some other study. Would love to have you join us. This group does meet during the day.
May God be with you every day as you walk with him.
Mary Thomas said:
The Bright Start preschoolers really enjoyed playing on the new playground yesterday. Thank you to everyone involved for showing
God’s love by being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.
Garrett Thomas said:
That is just the people we need.
Pastor Paul said:
Here’s the scoop…we have two new staff members to direct our music. It won’t be officially announced until Easter Sunday…but bloggers hear it first.
Today (Saturday) Pastor Parish Committee hired CORTNEY CAMPOS to be the Director of Special Music. Her task will be to coordinate all “Specials” at all worship services. This will include leading the choir, coordinating small music groups and soloists. She will start on April 1st.
You will remember Cortney as an Intern at Gashland UMC last fall as she was directing choir. She is a Senior at UMKC majoring in music and social work. She will also continuing working for Zales Jewelry at Metro North. More information will follow about choirs and rehearsals…but when you see her, welcome Cortney BACK to the staff.
THOMAS MYERS will join the staff as Director of Comtemporary Music. Thomas comes with a great list of music accomplishments. He is a composer and perfomer of Christian Music; accomplished guitar, keyboard and various other instruments.
Thomas spent two years in a prestigous music school in New York before transferring baqck to UMKC Conservatory of Music where he is a senior music performance and compostion major. He will aslo be working at Banana Republic on the Plaza.
Thomas will begin work and rehearsals on April 1st with the first Praise Team around mid-May or so.
WELCOME TO CORTNEY AND THOMAS
Greg Rackers said:
I was reading a Lenten meditation over lunch today and came across the following. It struck me because Jim and Andrea Hunter had asked for prayers last night for Juneitta, who has since passed on. I thought of sending this just to them, but perhaps someone else needs to hear this as well.
“We all must die. And we will all die alone. No one can make that final journey with us. We have to let go of what is most our own and trust that we did not live in vain. Somehow, dying is the greatest of all human moments because it is the moment in which we are asked to give everything. The way we die has not only much to do with the way we have lived, but also with the way that those who come after us will live. Jesus’ death reveals to us that we do not have to live pretending that death is not something that comes to all of us. As his hands stretched out between heaven and earth, he asks us to look our mortality straight in the face and trust that death does not have the last word. We can then look at the dying in our world and give them hope; we can hold their dying bodies in our arms and trust that mightier arms than ours will receive them and give them the peace and joy they always desire.
In dying, all of humanity is one. And it was into this dying humanity that God entered so as to give us hope.”
Henri Nouwen, “Walk with Jesus”
We talked in our study last night about the costs of deciding to follow Jesus. One of those costs is to love each other enough to hurt when they hurt.
The transition from this life to the next is indeed something we have to do by ourselves, but it is up to each of us to remind those still here that they are not alone. Each of us is still on our journey – may we find the strength to help each other through the times of sorrow that will come up in our lives.
Lee Messenger said:
I was driving in to work this morning, the roads were wet from the light snow that was falling, just thinking about how I would like to be back home in bed. I suspected that most everyone on the roads at that time probably pretty much had the same thought. Work can sure be a nuisance.
But, then early in the morning I received an email from an old friend that I worked with at a previous employer, American Nurses Association down by Crown Center in the early 1990s and he indicated that he was currently unemployed and looking for a position. Steve was a good man, in fact he was my boss at ANA.
It was then that I realized that God has always been with me in all of my various positions, and has always provided me with excellent opportunities for growth, for learning, for failure and for success. I must say also, that God also was with me when he placed my wife Cheryl in my life, as she has been with me in all of these various job changes as well.
Thanks be to God.