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Ramblings from Retirement – Lost! By Retired Pastor Lee Hemen May 10, 2021 Have ever been lost or have you had a child get lost? I’ve had both happen to me. When I was little, about 3 years old, my family was visiting the downtown area of the small town we lived near. They met another family that they knew and began talking to them and as they did my father reached over and placed me on the hood of a nearby car. No one thought anything about this in that era because cars were made a lot sturdier and out of sheet metal. It was a sunny spring day, the car hood was warm and I fell asleep. Waking up a short time later I realized that my family was nowhere to be seen. About this time a policeman came walking by and asked me if I was lost and where my family was. We were taught to trust any policeman. Shortly my family came running around the corner; my father first, then my brother, sister and mom. Of course they asked me where I had wandered off to but then realized that they were the ones...

Spiritual strength! - Ephesians 3:14-21 By Pastor Lee Hemen February 12, 2017 The spiritual strength that God provides gives the believer the tenacity to stay the course. Wanting to mature in her spiritual life one woman started what she called a Thanks-Living jar. Each evening she wrote on a small slip of paper one thing she thanked God for and dropped it in the jar. Some days she had many praises; other days she struggled to find one. At the end of the year she emptied her jar and read the slips. She discovered how God had given her simple things like a sunset or an evening stroll; or how he had provided momentary grace to handle a difficult situation. What is it that gives the believer the strength to go into hardships, frustrations, and at great personal sacrifice to foreign fields to share the good news? How can they spend years serving far away from their home country, neighborhoods, and families to serve the calling of Christ? How can the average believer stand fast in their fai...

God's children! - Galatians 4:1-7 By Pastor Lee Hemen August 7, 2016 What rights do children have? Some would say, "Way too many!" while others would declare, "Not enough!" Yet how the ancient world saw children is quite different from our modern day perception of every child being an "honored child". This might be kind of shocking to our sensitive ears but children were considered a kind of property and in some cases they were seen only as a means to establish a heritage. By today's standards and how overprotective some parents are you might say, "We've come a long way baby!" Paul had just gotten through establishing the fact that we "are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus". However what did this mean for the Galatian believers and for us today? Some mistakenly think that everyone is a "child of God" simply because they exist and while we are all created in the image of God we are not all children...

The Father and the Son! -- John 5:16-24 By Pastor Lee Hemen December 21 2014 Bill Crowder writes for the Radio Bible Class that “The Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, are known for their beautiful sweaters. Patterns are woven into the fabric using sheep’s wool to craft the garments. Many of them relate to the culture and folklore of these small islands, but some are more personal. Each family on the islands has its own trademark pattern, which is so distinctive that if a fisherman were to drown it is said that he could be identified simply by examining his sweater for the family trademark.” We all have the distinctive marks of our own father imprinted in us and not just in our DNA but often in our mannerism and even sometimes in our spirituality. Fathers and their sons do not always have the greatest of relationships and in fact it has only gotten worse because so many fathers are absent in the lives of their children. Yet we discover in John’s Gospel that Jesus had an excel...