Hey, everyone!!!

I will be doing a 'Credible Faith for a Skeptical World' event at a church in Indiana next month, and in July, I finished the first draft for one of the talks that I will be giving, 'How can God be good when he allows so much pain and suffering? And why a God who wants to save sinners must permit horrendous evils'. I will be giving two other talks at the church, but no Gospel recitation, and so will need to have developed a flyer and bulletin insert for that event that is different than the 'Gospel on Trial & Stage' flyer format that was used earlier this year. I started work on that, but have more work to go.

In July, I also started and completed a database project for information about pastors, academics, potential donors, and my contact with many of those persons. With over a year's worth of calling and emailing, I had begun to feel at least partially lost in a sea of data that I had recorded into excel sheets, and I wanted a way to be able to quickly find helpful information. For example, what pastors have I not called in the past six months? Or for what pastors do I need to do some sort of follow up (whether sending a CF brochure, or adding to the monthly email, or something else)? I was not able to get such information easily with the excel sheets that I was using. Further, I had a separate file for people to whom the next physical mailing would go out, which meant duplication of data. So, with help from the internet and codecademy.org (which I used when I learned HTML coding to code much of the Credible Faith web site), I learned how to use command line on a Mac and learned some SQL (Server Query Language) such that I could have one mySQL database on my computer with information about pastors, potential donors, mailings, and academics that I could quickly query for information. From beginning to end, the project lasted around two and half weeks or more. I also spent time learning how the USPS bulk mailing system works (boy, is it complicated!), given that I would like quarterly CF mailings to be sent to friends and donors, and first class postage, such as was used in the April mailing, would be prohibitively expensive in that regard.

Lastly, the car situation has been resolved with the help of some people, and I now have a Honda Accord that is in better shape than the Saturn I did have. May the Lord be praised for his provision!

On the family side, three stories, two about my nephew Silas and one about my nephew Ezra. When I was still in Scotland, I wanted to become a man of hymns, one who had memorized hymns and could sing them from memory. I started memorizing hymns there and have continued the practice after getting back to the US. On Sunday, July 10, Mom went out walking with Joal, Toby, and Hosea, and I was left here with my nephew Silas. Mom had put him in the crib for him to take a nap, but after she left, he climbed out and I nabbed him and put him back in the crib. I laid down on a nearby bed as if it to encourage him to sleep, and he made some motion with his hands that may have caused me to think of the 'He's got the whole world in his hands' song. I sang that song to him, and then did a Silas Phoenix rendition ('He's got Silas Phoenix in his hands'), and Uncle Paul and Mommy and Daddy renditions. I then sang much of Keith and Kristyn Getty's 'My Worth Is Not In What I Own' and 'Good Shepherd of My Soul' hymns, and then much of 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross'. Some time in the Getty hymns timeframe, he fell asleep. I sang my nephew to sleep!! And then, in light of the fact that I may never get such an opportunity again, I stood there and watched him for over 35 minutes.

Second story, from the same day. Hosea, Joal, and Toby returned and then Mom left. They wanted to watch something on TV. Initially, I indicated that majority vote would determine what would be watched. But I changed my mind and decided that they would all need to agree on what to watch. It took a long time, but eventually one of them indicated that he would give up his vote such that the other two could choose. Then one of the others responded and indicated that he wanted it to be fair to the one who who was willing to give up his vote. They ended up deciding on Spider-Man, but on opening the container, the Spider-man DVD was not there. They then settled on The Tale of Desperaux. Before they decided on Spider-man, while they were in the sunroom, I said to them, 'you just all need to come to an agreement about what's going to happen'. Pause. Then Silas, out of nowhere, blurts out, 'Spank your bottom!' It was hilarious!!!

Last story. Sometime later, a number of the nephews were here. A nephew comes out of the sunroom and says, 'Ezra threw a lego piece at me'. Ezra promptly defended himself from the sunroom. 'I didn't hit him'. It was as if Ezra was wanting to say that his bad aim absolved him of throwing something at his cousin. Again, hilarious (I don't claim that the words of Ezra and the nephew were exactly these, but they are close enough to get the gist of the story).

PRAYER REQUESTS
1. Fundraising. Financially, one of the hardest seasons for a ministry is the beginning. Please pray that God would bring monthly supporters alongside Credible Faith. Credible Faith is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and donations are accordingly tax-deductible in the US as permitted by law.

2. Ministry Opportunities. Pray that doors would be opened for ministry in churches and on campuses and for relationships to be formed that would be mutually beneficial for ministry in those places.

Have a great month!!!

Sincerely,

Paul

Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Groveland, Illinois, USA

Quote of the Month

A quote of Robin Phillips, "The War on the Word 'Marriage'" in World, January 2014: Arguments about “equal access” are an example of what I mean when I say that the gay lobby simply assumed the definition of marriage that, ostensibly, they were arguing for. The whole notion that homosexuals should be allowed “equal access” to the institution of marriage depended on maintaining some degree of continuity with the norms of an existing institution. This presence of continuity enabled advocates of gay marriage to form arguments in explicitly quantitative terms, as if they merely favored an expansion in the pool of people eligible to get married, rather than trying to qualitatively alter the very essence of marriage itself. This type of inclusive rhetoric has a very powerful instinctive appeal to Americans. Because of certain dark parts of our history, we naturally revolt against the idea of excluding a certain people group from any institution. The problem, of course, is that homosexuals are only being excluded from marriage, if we start by assuming the revisionist definition of marriage in the first place. For on the traditional understanding, no one is stopping homosexuals from getting married, since they are allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex. (The fact that they do not want to do this is no more relevant to the question than whether the pope wants to marry. Just as we shouldn’t feel the need to change the definition of marriage to include celibacy so that the pope can have “equal access” to the institution, so we shouldn’t feel the need to change the definition of marriage so that homosexuals can begin to want access to it.) In this way, those who were agitating for change implicitly assumed the revisionist understanding of marriage (i.e., that marriage does not mean a union of a man and a woman but, rather, a union of persons regardless of gender) and then proceeded to debate on that basis of that assumption. The conclusion of the argument had been smuggled into the terms of the argument itself, which meant that the argument was little more than the announcement: “We don’t agree with the conjugal definition of marriage.” The problem is that announcements are no more arguments than denials are refutations.