All I had a "confirmation" this afternoon. To explain, there are things I have heard many times and sort of accept as the truth but they somehow lack personal conviction. Without boring you with the details, my wife has been in charge of the starting up of a new Boy's Brigade Company. It is attached to a local Methodist congregation. The minister (pastor) was/is very excited because he used to be in the Brigade as a boy. Next Sunday is the annual enrolment service. My wife's biggest fear is the embarrassment of only having a few boys turn up. The reason for this is that a lot of the boys are unchurched in any way and do not yet have a great sense of resposibility and loyalty towards the Company (Outpost) nor chapel, nor do their parents. This got me thinking about why the minister had been so excited about a Company being started. It certainly isn't any guarantee of bums (fannies?) on seats. I then realised that he had experienced the Brigade as a boy and was aware of what the program consisted of. It is a program which, like Rangers, teaches boys about Jesus and salvation. I then realised that this is the seed falling into the ground just as in the parable and just as we do not know what makes the seed grow (despite what the scientists say) and come to be ready for harvest neither do we know what God does in the lives of these boys. The work between planting and harvesting is the Lord's alone. Some seed will fall by the wayside, fall in shallow ground, get choked by thorns but some seed WILL bear fruit. All I can do is sow and trust the Lord for the harvest but sow I will and harvest there will be (probably reaped by some pentecostal pastor who believes that he has done all the work <bg>). Strange that I have had this revelation after covering the subject of parables with my BB class which currently consists of one boy. BoW. _______ To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe rangernet" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Eat the hay & spit out the sticks!" RTKB&G4JC! Autoresponder: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rangernet.org
