March 27 2026

Dear Friends,

I can’t thank you enough for your prayers yesterday. Truly I believe that we experienced a miracle with my doctor’s appointment in Roanoke. First I only called on Monday afternoon to make an appointment for Thursday. Usually my Primary Care Physician is booked a couple of months out before I can get into see him.

First miracle: They called me back on Tuesday afternoon and told me that I could come in on Thursday at noon. I told the very kind nurse all the things that I needed to have done to get approved for the surgery in Wilmington with the surgeon before they would schedule it.

Second miracle: When I arrived yesterday early they actually called me in before noon and I met the nurse that had talked with me on the phone and after the preliminary weighing in and taking my blood pressure we again (which was very high – the top number was in the 170’s), I again told her that I needed a EKG, all the labs done on my blood, and also two shots in my hips for the constant pain that the doctor has give me shots for before, and for the all the forms to be filled out and faxed in to the surgeon’s office in Wilmington. She said it would be no problem for all of it to be done and went to get the doctor.

Third miracle: The doctor came in, took time to chat with me, and did a bunch of small test and rechecked my blood pressure (which was down considerably). He asked the nurse to come back in and do the EKG. He read it and then gave me the two shots in my hips, assured me everything was fine and that he would fax the forms to Wilmington. Then he sent me to the lab for the blood work. They took my blood within a few minutes and I was walking out to my car by 1 o’clock and on my way to Connecticut with Jon. Thank you! Thank you for your prayers!

Hopefully now the back surgery will be scheduled by the first of May! When I thanked the doctor for making the effort and taking the time to see me so soon and taking care of everything as I was leaving the examining room, I actually became very emotional and had tears. Again, thank you for your continued prayers for this trip up to Connecticut for Mr. Baldis’s Home Going Service.

Today, instead of my video post for pastor’s chat I want to share a devotional by Andrew Murray from his book, “Waiting on God”. I’m sure you will be blessed as you read this wonderful devotional and encouraged to wait on God more purposely in the day’s ahead!  God bless!

The God of Our Salvation

"My soul waiteth only upon God [marg: is silent unto God]; from Him cometh my salvation." (Psalm 62:1)

If salvation indeed comes from God, and is entirely His work, just as creation was, it follows, as a matter of course, that our first and highest duty is to wait on Him to do the work that pleases Him. Waiting becomes then the only way to the experience of a full salvation, the only way, truly, to know God as the God of our salvation. All the difficulties that are brought forward as keeping us back from full salvation, have their cause in this one thing: the defective knowledge and practice of waiting upon God. All that the Church and its members need for the manifestation of the mighty power of God in the world, is the return to our true place, the place that belongs to us, both in creation and redemption, the place of absolute and unceasing dependence upon God. Let us strive to see what the elements are that make up this most blessed and needful waiting upon God: it may help us to discover the reasons why this grace is so little cultivated, and to feel how infinitely desirable it is that the Church, that we ourselves, should at any price learn its blessed secret.

The deep need for this Waiting on God lies equally in the nature of man and the nature of God. God, as Creator, formed man, to be a vessel in which He could show forth His power and goodness. Man was not to have in himself a fountain of life, or strength, or happiness: the ever-living and only living One was each moment to be the Communicator to him of all that he needed. Man's glory and blessedness was not to be independent, or dependent upon himself, but dependent on a God of such infinite riches and love. Man was to have the joy of receiving every moment out of the fulness of God. This was his blessedness as an unfallen creature.

When he fell from God, he was still more absolutely dependent on Him. There was not the slightest hope of his recovery out of his state of death, but in God, His power and mercy. It is God alone who began the work of redemption; it is God alone who continues and carries it on each moment in each individual believer. Even in the regenerate man there is no power of goodness in himself: he has and can have nothing that he does not each moment receive; and Waiting on God is just as indispensable, and must be just as continuous and unbroken, as the breathing that maintains his natural life.

It is, then, because Christians do not know their relation to God of absolute poverty and helplessness, that they have no sense of the need of absolute and unceasing dependence, or the unspeakable blessedness of continual Waiting on God. But when once a believer begins to see it, and consent to it, that he by the Holy Spirit must each moment receive what God each moment works, Waiting on God becomes his brightest hope and joy. As he apprehends how God, as God, as Infinite Love, delights to impart His own nature to His child as fully as He can, how God is not weary of each moment keeping charge of his life and strength, he wonders that he ever thought otherwise of God than as a God to be waited on all the day. God unceasingly giving and working; His child unceasingly waiting and receiving: this is the blessed life.

"Truly my soul waiteth upon God; from Him cometh my salvation." First we wait on God for salvation. Then we learn that salvation is only to bring us to God, and teach us to wait on Him. Then we find what is better still, that Waiting on God is itself the highest salvation. It is the ascribing to Him the glory of being All; it is the experiencing that He is All to us. May God teach us the blessedness of waiting on Him.

"My soul, wait thou only upon God!"