Pastor's Devotions by Tim Harris

I know that title sounds terrible, but I can assure you it’s not as bad as it sounds.   You see, my father was a public school teacher.   Early on, when the family was young and his salary was on the lower end of the spectrum, he would work summer jobs like driving a bus for a local day camp.   Later on, however, he would use his summers to do projects around the house and spend time with the family.   I believe he really enjoyed his summers.   But as any school teacher can understand, when the last week of August came, his mind would switch to preparing himself for going back to school and starting the new school year.   Well, that is exactly when my birthday came: August 25 th (yes, that was yesterday!).   It wasn’t that my dad wasn’t glad that I was born. It was just that my birthday became the signal that the new school year was about to start.   My birthday brought about a shift in his mind—i.e. the end of the summer had arrived and it was time to get back to the classroom!

I haven’t written this Pastor’s Devotion blog for a couple of weeks since I was away on vacation with Kim and the family.   As we do each summer, we spent our time with Kim’s parents at “the cabin” on Lake Pleasant in the Adirondack Mountains.   Thankfully, our “kids” were able to come and spend at least part of the time with us, doing the things that they look forward to doing while there—e.g. wakeboarding, sailing, swimming, hiking, etc.   One morning last week, we decided to do a hike we had not done before.   Rather than climb one of the mountains, we thought it would be nice to hike from one set of waterfalls to another along the Sacandaga River as was written up in a pamphlet listing various hikes in the region.   All began as planned as we drove to the trailhead, found the first set of falls and then began on the trail that would lead to the second set of falls.   However, in less than a quarter of a mile the trail led us up to the main road and stopped. We realized that th