August 5

Worship was powerful this past weekend. One of several highlights was Sara singing "We will Cry". (The file is hosted on www.drop.io, a very cool utility. Bookmark it.)

I wrote this confession for Sunday. For some reason it was overlooked at 8:20, and at 11:00 there was some kind of technical problem, but here it is:

Lord, You call us to a life of faith and faithfulness – of living with trust that the life revealed in Your Word is
Your best design for our lives.

We confess our weak obedience to Your call. We drift far from Your path for us. We are often distracted by
other voices around us. And when the journey includes hard times, we struggle even to believe that You
have our good at heart.

But here and now, we declare yet again our faith in You.

We confess our sins, confident that Your promise of forgiveness is true.

We ask once again for the filling of Your Holy Spirit, to empower our life in You.

We thank You for your many gifts of grace. Amen.

The sermon, "Grace for the Hard Times", was excellent. It can be heard here. Afterward, Raymond sang "Healing Rain" - also archived at www.drop.io/mp3s080308. It was very powerful.

• Alicia and Miles flew home from Cape Cod yesterday. It's good to have the whole family under one roof again.

• Tropical Storm Edouard was a blowout. When I was a kid we used to call these "rainy days", and they didn't cancel all regular television programming so the news guys could talk it up all day long. They didn't send some poor sap of a reporter out to a street corner so that he could say on local network television "There is a puddle of water here on the side of the road". Literally!