Not sure if I’d mentioned it, but two things that are different about our Sunday School class: (1) instead of having a time of asking for prayer requests that rarely get prayed for – plus often individuals are shy about sharing something with a large group, in our class we break up into pairs (men with men, women with women) and share prayer requests one on one. It’s really helped people (like me) get to know each other. And (2) we also have a time where people can share if they’d had any gospel conversations with previous week. Most weeks there are two or three stories. Serves as a great example to those of us who rarely ever share.
Some like the guy who leads music in the JFBC contemporary service. He never lets the lack of time get in the way. We used to sit behind the control board during the service. I could see the countdown clock that would re-set for each song and the sermon. I could look at it and see how much time was left. When the green counter hit zero the clock would turn to red, and keep counting. Bobby usually goes over with the worship music. Johnson Ferry is not big at all about limiting the service to an hour. Before the pandemic it got to be a problem because there were a bunch of people waiting to get into the second service but the first service had run long.
And even though it’s the contemporary service, most of the songs are traditional hymns or older well-known contemporary songs, played on piano, guitar, and drums as opposed to the organ. Heather Swilley does a great job leading the worship songs, though Bobby is quite demonstrative, waving his arms from his seat at the piano.
JFBC pastor Clay Smith has done a good job addressing sensitive subjects head on. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of offending people.
Reminds me – the couple we had dinner with last Friday night, the wife of my small group leader John is Laurel Harrell, a longtime church pianist for churches in East Point and Dunwoody, as well as Weiuca Road. She said John Condra had wished her a happy birthday last week. Laurel didn’t know Arden or Joy Callaway, but Norma McDonald was good friends with her mother – also a church pianist. In fact when the Harrell’s recently visited her parents down on St. Simons, Norma was feeling under the weather so Laurel filled in for her at their church.
I try to not talk about myself (except on here) but need to be better about asking other people questions about themselves. My friend Rob and his wife Nancy are so good at making the conversation be about the other person. Last week they got me talking about a story from my life, and I hated it because it felt like I was going on and on about myself.
ARKY VAUGHAN [SABR Bio] was the first player to hit two home runs in an All-Star game, on 08-Jul-1941 (Neither hit the transformer tower). His “Wally Pipp” was named Thevenow. In Vaughan’s rookie season, Pittsburgh’s starting shortstop Tommy Thevenow suffered an ankle injury. Vaughan took his place and averaged 142 games per season for the next nine years. Vaughan finished exactly 23rd in league MVP voting for three years straight, in 1932, 1933 & 1934. He later twice finished as high as third, in 1935 & 1938, but never took home the top prize, his team’s lack of high finishes possibly a contributing factor.
Denison: former New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof recently reported some good news: "Historically, almost half of humans died in childhood; now only 4% do. Every day in recent years, until the pandemic, another 170,000 worldwide emerged from extreme poverty. Another 325,000 obtained electricity each day. Some 200,000 gained access to clean drinking water." In Factfulness, Hans Rosling cites more good news: (1) in the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has fallen by almost half. (2) The number of deaths from natural disasters is 25% of what it was 100 years ago. (3) Flying has gotten 2,100 times safer than when commercial aviation began.(4) Deaths in battle per million people have fallen from 2,103 in 1942 to 12 in 2016. (5) 80% of the world's population has some access to electricity. The progress in the last century have changed life for enormous good.
ME: quite a different story than you get from the government and national news.
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