Brown's Daily Word 7-1-11

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this first day of July. It is going to be brilliant and beautiful. Our youngest daughter Jessica was born on this day in 1984. We praise the Lord for Jessica, who loves the Lord and loves life. Tom and Jessica will be coming home this weekend. Janice and her family will be coming home this weekend along with Meredith our fifth daughter from Washington, DC. I am planning for a mega chicken barbecue.
We will meet for worship Sunday at 9 AM at Wesley UMC and at 10:15 AM at Union Center UMC. I will be speaking on "Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence" for our weekly Tel vision out reach this evening at 7 PM on Time Warner channel 4.
As we prepare to celebrate the July 4 - Independence Day, let praise the Lord for America the beautiful and great. Somebody once wisely said that a great nation Is a grateful nation (Deuteronomy 6:12)
So many amazing stories have come out of the world war II. It is gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket. Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea, but there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Rickenbacker into the most harrowing adventure of his life. Somewhere over the South Pacific his airplane, the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant harks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark they saw was ten feet long. Of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable, starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them. And a miracle occurred.
In Captain Eddie’s own words, "Cherry," that was the B-17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off. . . Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food - if I could catch it."
The rest of the story is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know that Captain Eddie made it. And now you also know that he never forgot, because every Friday evening, about sunset on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast you could see an old man walking, white-haired, bushy-browed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle, like manna in the wilderness.
We must remember that the reason America has been the great nation that it has is because God has blessed us and thank Him for all of our blessings.

A Great Nation Is a Righteous Nation (Proverbs 14:34)
Righteousness has been defined by some as “right living.” It has also been defined a “right relationship with God.” Putting these two things together, we can say that if we have a right relationship with God, then the product for our lives is right living. Jesus is the answer. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We must present Jesus as the answer because it is only through His righteousness that we obtain the righteousness of God.
A Great Nation Is a Praying Nation (II Chronicles 7:14)
Things truly happen when God’s people pray. Let us remember where our blessings came from, turn our hearts to God, and pray for Him to intervene on our behalf.
In Christ,
Brown
http://youtu.be/yNbLtiG2dWU