SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

wait til next yearHistorian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her wonderful little memoir, Wait Till Next Year, tells about an evening ritual she and her father shared on summer evenings. He would return home to Long Island from his job in the City having missed the Dodgers game. He had shown his young daughter how to keep a box score. They would sit on the sofa with the box score of the day’s game between them, and from it, Doris would recreate the game for her father. It was her primary training as a historian. Only years later did she find out that her father had already listened to the games on the radio.

            As children head to school this fall, I am reminded of being seven or eight years old. Every day the school bus stopped in front of our little rambler, and my two enormous collies who had been sitting as sentinels in our front yard would come to greet me. When I entered the house my mother, over her ironing or cooking, would listen as long as it took, while I shared all  I had learned that day. 

            Most of what spilled out was information: that Abraham Lincoln had been born in a cabin as small as our living room (imagine that! We would visit Lincoln’s birthplace several times when I was a boy); that .5=1/2; and that spiders were not insects, but arachnids. Who punched who, or who fell off the jungle gym interested me less than the fact that the entire State of Hawaii was volcanic. That personal information would have been more interesting to my mother than repeating facts she already possessed. She always acted like she was hearing the information for the first time, however, and so I kept on sharing. It was my primary training to be a preacher.

            I feel like it is what I still do. I spend time in the Word, and then get to share what I learn with my family. What could be better?

            I have had more than a score of summer interns, male and female, over the years, and at least four of them, faced with preparing a lesson, have said to me: “I don’t have anything to say.” I have told them all, “You don’t have to have anything to say. Just study your text and tell us what God says – if you do that well, you will have done everything important.” I believe that with all my heart.

            Sharing the gospel is just that simple (which is not to say that it is easy). We have received good news. We have been asked to share it.

            In order to do this we must listen to the Word. We must be excited by the word. We must care about those who need to hear. If we listen, and we care sharing the gospel is as natural as talking to mom after a long, productive day at school.

            The stories in the Bible contain more information and more meaning that we would be able to exhaust in a thousand lifetimes.  We will never finish listening and learning – which means we will never run out of things to tell.

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