Faith Fellowship Church

Psalm 42:6 O my God, my soul is cast down within me;
Therefore I will remember You from the land of the Jordan,
And from the heights of Hermon,
From the Hill Mizar. (NKJ Version)

Phillip Keller in his book entitled, A Shepherd Looks at the 23^rd Psalm (Zondervan Publishing House; Grand Rapids, Michigan; 1970), writes, In Psalm 42:11 he cries out, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God…’

Now there is an exact parallel to this in caring for sheep. Only those intimately acquainted with sheep and their habits understand the significance of a ‘cast’ sheep or a ‘cast down’ sheep.

This is and old English shepherd’s term for a sheep that has turned over on its back and cannot get up again by itself.

When Julius Caesar landed on the shores of Britain with his Roman legions, he took a bold and decisive step to ensure the success of his military venture. Ordering his men to march to the edge of the Cliffs of Dover, he commanded them to look down at the water below. To their amazement, they saw every ship in which they had crossed the channel engulfed in flames. Caesar had deliberately cut off any possibility of retreat. Now that his soldiers were unable to return to the continent, there was nothing left for them to do but to advance and conquer! And that is exactly what they did. Source Unknown.

You must get involved to have an impact. No one is impressed with the won-lost record of the referee. John H. Holcomb, The Militant Moderate (Rafter).

Terry Dashner Senior Pastor of Faith Fellowship Church www.ffcba.org

One evening a little girl and her parents were sitting around the table eating supper. The little girl said, "Daddy, you’re the boss, aren’t you?" Her Daddy smiled, pleased, and said yes. The little girl continued "That’s because Mummy put you in charge, right?"

Daddys…you’ve got to love them.

Country music star Tim McGraw says he used to be selfish and cared only about his career. Then he met wife Faith Hill, become a dad to three daughters, Gracie, Maggie and Audrey, and gained a whole new perspective on life.

"You go through all those motions of being successful," Tim told Oprah Winfrey. "Then you meet somebody to fall in love [with] and then you have children. The way you relate to everything-the way that your country’s going, the way that your world’s going, how your kids are being educated, what your kids are thinking, what influences they have on them, what you think about your God-all that stuff changes."

It was the summer of 1942. I was nineteen years old and a signalman third class on the USS Astoria stationed in the South Pacific.

One hot night in August, we found ourselves skirmishing with the Japanese for control of Guadalcanal, gearing up for the bloody battle that soon followed. At midnight, I finished my duty on watch. Still wearing my work detail uniform of dungarees and a T-shirt, and only pausing long enough to unstrap my standard-issue life belt and lay it beside me, I fell into an exhausted sleep.

Two hours later, I was awakened abruptly by the sound of an explosion. I jumped to my feet, my heart pounding. Without thinking, I grabbed my life belt and strapped it on. In the ensuing chaos, I focused on dodging the rain of enemy shells that were inflicting death and destruction all around me. I took some shrapnel in my right shoulder and leg, but by some miracle, I avoided being killed.

When you measure the distance from one city to the next, you chart the distance in miles. If you measure the distance between stars, you cannot use inches, feet, yards or miles to specify the distance. That type of measuring breaks down in the vastness of the universe. You measure the distance of stars by light years.

A light year is the distance that light travels in one year. The speed of light is 186,287.5 miles per second. You can find out the number of seconds in a year by multiplying the number of seconds in a minute (60) by the number of minutes in an hour (60). Then multiply that by the number of hours in a day (24), and multiply that by the number of days in a year (approximately 365.25).