Monday, February 25, 2008

Greetings to all:

I hope that everyone is well today and is having a positive day thus far and will have through out the rest of the day.

As well as being a “dog lover” I am also a “deer watcher and lover” and so was Marty. Well guess what! I just came off of about a half hour of “deer watching”, so you know how I am feeling right now. All of God’s creation is so awesome, and I just get a great deal of enjoyment out of watching deer. Their coat blends in the woods so well that sometimes it is a real challenge to follow them. They can stand so still for so long it just really seems unbelievable. Today there were about four of them in an area where I had put some food for them, and it seems like they were enjoying it – praise the Lord! I also have a corn block out for them that is up closer to the house, but I missed them when they were at it. I am sure from the way they were moving in the woods that they had been to it but I just didn’t see them. I also love it when they hear Buddy bark. They look up and see him and I think they just think “O, it is just him.” and go right on eating. Buddy sure doesn’t seem to bother them. I think they have learned that he cannot get out into the woods. God is so good – all the time! All the time – God is so good. What an awesome God to have created the creation that He did. Praise the Lord!

Well the week-end was busy, but went very well. Praise the Lord! I was very pleased that 11 people came to the class yesterday on dying, death, and grief. I dealt mainly with dying and things that really need to be done even before we might find out we are dying and then especially when we do learn that is happening to our bodies. One of the keys to the whole thing is that we really need to think and TALK about the way we are going to die. The one thing that we do know for sure is that we are born to die, so rather than talking all around it we need to talk right to that fact, have things in order, and help our loved ones and family to bring closer in a peaceful and orderly way. If you wonder what I mean by all that come to the class next week and you will learn more.

This is “Jack’s Dispatch” to talk about my ministry and it was a lot like I though it would be yesterday that God pulled out a number of examples to share with those gathered about the important aspects of dying that I was sharing. Some of them went all the way back into the ‘70’s while others were as fresh as just a few weeks ago. The other really interesting thing is that as I shared my out line with the Spiritual Development Team, Judy our Christian Educator, shared with me her APCE magazine that she had just received, and guess what it was all about. You got it – dying and death. What has been so awesome is that it has supported everything that I had on the out line. So I guess that my education, 38 years of ministry, 200+ death messages delivered with law enforcement, 340 times ministering with families and doing funerals, has taught me something and has had the right elements in it. Praise the Lord!

Well here we go again. I just got on to talk a little about the deer and have gotten off into something else and gone on and on. I guess that it goes along with that old saying of don’t let a preacher talk or you will be there for an hour. Maybe we will have to add to that not to let a preacher on the blog or you will be reading for a while. Whatever!

I hope to get a lot done around the house today, since it is my day off, but if I don’t soon get busy it sure isn’t going to happen. For some reason or another it just doesn’t do itself and Buddy seems to be too busy with his “job” of watching the neighborhood out of the bedroom window to do any of it and/or to even help. So I will sign off for now, push the spell check key and hope for the best.

Have a positive day, take care, and God bless.

Jack
Romans 8:28