We visited Ken and Jane Friday night - so nice seeing them. Ken is a very studious, focused and precise person, as most of you know. I t was interesting that he mentioned, during the course of our conversation, that he has found himself more nostalgic recently, that things take him into the past...I think I understand exactly why that is...Like us, they are in a precarious financial situation. They don't have good options for the future, as far as they can see....What you can hamdle as a young person, full of natural energy, is much more difficult as that fades...And you tend to want to retreat into a safer world - the world of the past where you felt secure, protected...Not that you want to be locked in nostalgia and waste the years that are left...What sincere Christian wants to do that?...It is just a tendency as you get older...He was interested in the biographical information I had read on Phil Johnson's website - thet the older Spurgeon had begun to write boyhood memoirs, and as a dying man, had revisited the scenes of childhood...Do the girls remember reading in "Christie" that Miss Alice's father had determined the greatest gift he could give his children was a joyful and secure childhood?... Those years really do provide a refuge and a picture to turn to in order to understand the security of our unchanging heavenly father...No big revelation there, but I am surprised how important that still is as you get older...

"Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, "I have no pleasure in them...."...Yet I do have pleasure...And almost all of it, on this earth, rests in you who are reading this, and the little children you have given us....

Onward to the end!