Covenant Conversations

     The word "disciple" is found 256 times in the King James Version of the Bible, while the word "discipleship" does not exist in the KJV.      Most, if not all of the teachers from my youth who contributed to my growth in Christ have since passed away.  I am sixty years old. My walk with Christ began before I confessed Christ formally in my church and was baptized around age seven.       I was blessed to have a salvation experience which grew out of my Christian family, so early (around age seven) that I cannot remember not having faith in Jesus.  There is nothing like what people today refer to as a "back-story," revealing a clear divide between a former nefarious life of sin and a new, redeemed life of walking in Christ.       This is not to say that I was born a good boy. I was not. For, I know that I was born wicked, steeped in sin, not unlike David in Psalm 51, " Behold, I was shapen  in   ...

In the West, and particularly in the U.S., we have become excessively, even compulsively, fearful of germs. A healthy respect for germs is good, and we need to focus on facilitating a cleaner environment for the elderly, as their immune systems weaken with age.  But children need a certain exposure to pathogens for the optimal development of their immune systems. A close friend of mine has been particularly blessed with a robust immune system. While each member of his family caught pertussis a few years ago, he did not get sick, despite the whooping cough being highly contagious. The same happened with a couple of variants of Covid 19.  That, and he sleeps right between two of his five children. They have been camping out in Granville County on their land for three years since they lost their house in a house fire in February of 2019. He is sixty years old. I believe he has been blessed with such a strong immune system largely because he was not raised in a typical American h...