We are moving right along with spring break 2009. Most of it is business as usual around the house. My daughter got out some yesterday but stayed home today. My youngest and I stayed in yesterday but got out today. Tomorrow we will again reverse the order. She will be going on an outing while us two guys stick around the house. Maybe that is going to be the norm for the week. At least today's outing wasn't too long. Luckily he found the new video game he wanted in record time. This gave me time to do some exercise as well as some mowing. Perhaps it is fitting on St. Patrick's Day that my mower took care of the clover. Can't say that there were any of the four leaf kind but maybe I didn't look too close. It was busy enough just keeping the mower blades clean of all the wet clover.

Is it me or are our news channels getting even more doom and gloom? We don't normally observe Lent in the Baptist tradition. At the rate its going, my Lent action would be to give up news television. They seem as if they stopped reporting news. Most of what little I saw today consisted of having people argue on a topic. Somewhere we stopped getting the news as much as watching people fight. We spend more time blaming someone else for our current conditions rather than dealing with them. If Congress wasn't so important it would be almost hysterical to watch them in action. We do live in a different world now.

We sit here on St. Patrick's Day 2009 watching our world be transformed daily. Our country is divided more than ever. It seems to me almost a replay of the 1960s with conflict over Vietnam or other social issues. Could it be the political division of our time is a reflection on the turbulence of that era? I would imagine most people are on the conservative side of the political spectrum. That would be especially true of most regular people like us. But we also have a generation that swings the other way. It looks like we lost the middle ground where agreement outweighs division.

Our world is also much less Christian than ever. Sure, we have lots of people who claim to be religious or spiritual but maybe not Christian. A recent study shows that my denomination is shrinking along with getting older. We Baptists thought we would be immune to that but we aren't. What is common among the more mainline denominations is now happening to us. One writer suggested that Methodists may just go away before long. It will not be much longer until the same projections are made of us. There really is no call to brag if we outlast any other denomination if we are both heading for the same fate.

We pat ourselves on the back for believing the Bible yet tend to fall short of putting it into practice. We use the local church as some measure of pride without realizing it really does not belong to us. We have too many private meetings where ministers or other church folk are dissected like a high school biology class. We hold on to our traditions that outlived their usefulness. We could go into more but let's leave it at that. Maybe we can take the next few posts to lay out the possibilities for the future and not just a terminal prognosis. Just be prepared. We will probably be brutally honest in some of the comments. Know that there are things that I need to hear as well as write. Our goal will not be for you to agree with me. Just think or pray about what we may say. The church is worth it all to God who works through it. The world is worth it to God since He gave His son to die for it. Let it be worth something to you as you think about how to join Him in rescuing both.

Bro. Trey