Years ago in my room at Moody I would pray at night with my roommate Paul Davidheizer. We would get in our beds and turn off the light, then we would each pray. After we prayed we would usually talk for a while. Often I would still be talking after I discovered the Paul was asleep. He was a great guy but I could just talk longer than he could listen.

This weekend I preached in South Haven. It was a perfect early autumn-like weekend. On the way over we visited my little brother Nathan’s new home and spent the night there enjoying a long talk with coffee by the fireside before bed.

Lately I’ve been doing some thinking about church. A church is:

After Skipper and Yoder we looked for a purebred Golden Retriever. We found a breeder up near Butler, Ohio and talked him into selling us the runt of the litter. We brought her home and she never wore a lead. She never spent an hour in the dog run. She was never put on a chain. Her name was Ginger. At the time we lived on a farm in a valley on a dead-end road and Ginger had the run of the farm. …

As I write this we are on our way home from South Haven where we preached and sang at Bethel Baptist Church. Chuck is driving so I can write and work on some messages for tomorrow. We will return for the next two Sundays to South Haven. I am looking forward to being on the west coast of Michigan for the arrival of autumn. The trees are just starting to color in a few places. Saturday night we stood on a wooden deck drinking coffee …

It’s been an exciting week at the Character Inn. The new class of Verity students is arriving from around the country and some new Character Inn staff members are coming in. God has provided thirty-five staff members to work with us this fall. They are all young missionaries. This fall we have formed a development team to create a new program involving intense study of the lives of great Christians and the devotional classics. The program will be for college credit like a Bible Institute. …

There is something about love that makes sacrifice sweet. My dad understood this. He didn’t talk about it he just did it. He may have learned that from his father. My grandfather worked all his life to buy a farm. He would love to have been able to raise his children on a farm but he was never able to do that. A few years after his last child married and started a family of his own he and grandma purchased a simple farm …

Growing up we moved briefly to Oklahoma. It was a difficult experience for us. We were suffering from culture shock. We had very little money. We had not yet developed a network of friends. We missed our familiar Ohio.