Billy Goat Log: 08/21/2010, 9:33 PM EDST

• So I have not posted in a while. The last few weeks have been somewhat hectic and in some ways emotionally draining.
  
  
• There is a church in our metropolitan area that does a "home make-over" once a year. This year my married daughter and family were nominated for the home make-over, and the church picked their house to work on. The work was done last weekend. A whole bunch of volunteers from the church, a number of businesses providing materials and etc, and Sunday afternoon my daughter, son-in law, and grandchildren returned to a refurbished and redecorated house. I was personally overwhelmed by all the work this group had done. My daughter's family is on the upper edge of the "working poor" blue collar class. It has been a real struggle for them, and what the church did in fixing up the house will be a real help. We are humbled and thankful for this kind providence. God was very gracious and kind to us as a family.
  
  
• While their house was being worked on, they put the family up in a local motel, and had a number of special things planned for them. One of the events was to go to watch our local minor league baseball team play a home game. My wife and I got to go along also. It was really nice.
  
  I don't get out to watch our local team play that often, but every time I've gone to the local baseball park to watch them, I've really enjoyed it. I realized how much I enjoy watching a live baseball game. One of the things on my retirement "to do" list will be to get to more baseball games. and yes, our local team won the game, and we enjoyed the fireworks afterwards.
  
  Did I mention my oldest grandson got to throw out one of the "first pitches"? That was pretty neat!
  
  
• I recently opened a page at Scribd. I published some previous material there, and have been encouraged by the response. I realize I need to come up with some new, never before published material.
  
  
• Summer is winding down. The days are shorter and the nights cooler. This fall I plan on doing some more splitting/transplanting in the flower gardens. There is something about getting out of the house and putzing around in the yard, looking after the perennial flowers we have there. I get some sense of what it may have been like for Adam to tend the garden of Eden; as though in that yard and garden work I touch root with Eden itself...
  
  
• We were at a Christian bookstore today. I didn't buy anything. As I wandered through the aisles, I really wondered if there was much there that really met people where they really needed to be met, and how much of it was just so much fluff and vapor. I tend to be cynical, but it would not be at all fair for me to pass wholesale judgement on books I have not read. But then I don't feel compelled to have to read whatever "latest and greatest" just came out either. The only "must read" for the Christian is the Bible itself. Other books can be helpful, and I myself have been helped along the way by other books, but when you get down to the very root of the matter, there is only one book absolutely needful.
  
  
• The relationship of Isreal and the church, the degree of continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments, suprasessionism or "replacement theology" vs. dispinsationalism: I'm not convinced anyone has really come up with a Biblicaly satisfactory answer. The answers I've seen from all camps are at some point or another less then so.
  
  
• Jesus Christ is LORD...