A blessed new morning to you. I’m sitting here having my coffee as the cardinals come to the Backyard Buffet for breakfast. It is a clear morning and the sun is shining bright. I have Andre Reiu playing in the background  and the hummingbirds seem to almost be dancing to the music as they buzz around and then hover. It is a peasant morning. But, I also hear a squirrel fussing about something which means the cardinals better get on the feeders instead of ground feeding this morning. There may be a cat lurking about.

I just realized that we will be leaving on vacation a week from tomorrow. We are going to Las Vegas for a reunion of guys that I was stationed in the Philippines with back in the late 1960’s. I’m not really big on reunions and here we are going to two of them this fall. I have another one to attend in November. My impression is that so many people tend to want to relive the events of a specific period of time in their lives and they never move on. It might sound strange for me to say but even though I spent thirty two years in the Air Force and had a career that was successful beyond my imagination, that was another life ago. It has been seventeen years since I retired from the USAF. We didn’t retiree around a military base and I rely on a base for nothing. But, I sometimes listen to guys talk about their time in the military and one would think it was the most important time in their life. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, I don’t know which, I was able to walk out the gate and not look back. That part of my life was over.

Ms. Kate has a hair appointment this morning for a permanent. I’m not sure what I will do. I guess I’ll go down stairs and work on my sermon for the Sunday that I get back from vacation. I need to get that wrapped up. I generally write a four page sermon and stretch it out. I try to hold my sermons to fifteen minutes and Pastor Art does too. I’m in he middle of page three right now but I also know I will go back and rewrite some of what I have written. That’s just what I do. So, in actuality I’m maybe only half done. I don’t want to come home and have to rush putting something together. I know of guys that will say they never know what they are going to give a sermon on until they actually walk up to the pulpit. They say they are “letting the Lord speak to them and tell them what to say.” I say they get there and get redundant really quickly. I put a lot of thought and prayer into my sermons and also research. Maybe they are smarter than I am. At any rate, I got to finish up the sermon.

having said that, gotta’ go. You have a most pleasant day. Shalomn.