get my children out of the muddy, muddy

Good evening friends,
The first evening of our New Beginnings retreat was fruitful and engaging. I ask you to continue to pray for our urban Presbyterian congregations as we learn more tomorrow. I'd also ask you to keep the work of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in prayer as they host a festival the next two days at Sahlen Stadium (4 pm each day.) I pray that God will bring a rush of the Spirit in Rochester so many can hear the good news of God's love.

Today's reading gives us the story of Noah in the ark with his family and all the animals. It's a hard scene to imagine, but even out of destruction, God eventually brings new life.

God bless,
Sam

Genesis 8:1-14

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; ²the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, ³and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty days the waters had abated;

⁴and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. ⁵The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.

⁶At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made ⁷and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. ⁸Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; ⁹but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. ¹⁰He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; ¹¹and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. ¹²Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more.

¹³In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. ¹⁴In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.