Churches in the South have strange names sometimes. Here are a few actual church names I noticed coming back from camp meeting last week:

Faith by Hearing Church
Living Stones Church
Old Path Holiness Church of the Apostles.

That last one was a mouthful! My sister informs me that she knew a church in Texas called the "Celtic Tabernacle of the South." Me, I prefer to stick with churches that have more traditional names, like 7/22.

Today is my mom's birthday!

Happy birthday, Mom!

We went out to the Italian buffet today to celebrate. I had two steaks, a bunch of shrimp, and some pizza. It was awesome! Almost as awesome as my mom, who took me to Anderson to do a little shopping last week! We had a lot of fun in the bookstores. That is to say, I had a lot of fun in the bookstore while she went fabric shopping. It's fun shopping with Mom!

I just got back from spending a week at Brasher Springs Camp Meeting, an old-time "holiness" camp meeting in Alabama that my family has gone to (on and off) all while I was growing up. It was a real "old-timey" camp -- some of the cabins had running water, and there was one telephone for the entire camp. So I haven't had access to email or internet anything.

My dad and another guy were the preachers this year. I always enjoy hearing my dad preach! This year I was the special "Founder's Day" speaker. Last year my sister was the speaker, and gave a retrospective on what the camp had meant to her. I guess most everybody was expecting me to do the same, but since she pretty well said everything I would have said, I decided to preach a sermon on holiness.

I really wanted the sermon to go over well -- my great-grandfather helped found the camp, and now I'm the fourth generation to preach there. There were five people in the camp over the age of 90, and some of them have known the last three generations of my family and I wanted to -- well, maybe not "impress" them, but at least reassure them that the next generation was stepping up to continue things. The problem was, I just couldn't get my sermon to sound right in preparation. I kept thinking to myself, "This isn't going to fly. It's going to flop."

Finally, at 10:30 the night before I was to give the sermon, I realized what was wrong: I was envisioning my audience as a bunch of college professors who weren't inclined to agree with me. I had spent most of the sermon carefully defining my terms, reinforcing the points with scripture, and dealing with possible objections -- in short it was an academic lecture!

So, I cut out the entire middle section, and expanded the ending -- which was what I thought was important anyway -- so it was more fully developed. I got excited, and when I finally went to bed, I fell asleep preaching it into my pillow.

The next morning, I gave the sermon, and it went over very well. I got many compliments on the sermon from very old retired preachers, who know how to recognize a good sermon. I felt tremendously relieved, and it was the fulfillment of a (secret) dream of mine to preach at a camp alongside my father!