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25 years ago today....the heavens shook....the wind swirled...and Amy Elizabeth Beard was born. She was awesome cute....fat cheeks...her cheeks were so fat they caused her eyes to squish all up. She was happy all the time...and she was the most mischievious child I had ever met. I am sure this is because I did not know her dad as a child. Amy was the middle of three girls...Ashley first...Amy...and then my Becca. We have lived more life since the entrance of our daughters than I can post in a blog...we have laughed our heads off at their antics..cried with them over hurts...and waited at bedsides for doctors reports. We have played...worked and worshipped together...we have crashed...burned and shared amazing victory together. Together has been our motto...if we had a family crest it would contain 4 Beard women grinning and 1 Beard man looking harrassed as he keeps watch..always together. But recently that has changed. My beautiful Amy will hear her first happy birthday this year in her own home from her new husband. She married in July...wonderful man who loves Jesus and is crazy bout my Amy...all good. Well I have just recently decided that I am going to survive this great betrayal of my sweet daughter...leaving her momma after years of devotion..my word...where would she get a notion like that. She has insisted on leaving and cleaving too..what in tarnation? But with a kick in the seat from my precious Savior and some very pointed looks from my husband...I have graciously allowed my new son to live...and to love my daughter with minimal interference from me....whew...survived that...checking my armor...all in place...still believing...still receiving from Jesus... What a great giver of daughters I am...moving on...then just recently here comes my Becca....Becca is our baby...not yet 21...she is amazing...stubborn...fiercely loyal (in fact she is fierce period) ...a sold out radical Jesus freak....and she is fairly certain that her daddy wears a super hero costume under his clothes. So...here she comes to me...her devoted momma of 20 years and she is talking about the possibility of overseas missions. We spoke with a missionary tonight and her dad about her experience. As I hung the phone up...I heard my head screaming in eight different directions...joy...pride...sorrow...grief...fear...how to process it all...so I called her daddy...he can fix it...after all he's been fixing her broken stuff for years...I waited for him to say she is not going ...it is not safe...she is not ready...what he said was..."momma...we have to trust God...he will get her through and us too." What good advice...very Biblical...ARE YOU KIDDING ME CLIFF....THIS IS MY DAUGHTER AND I WILL NOT GIVE HER UP! Well, I have been reminded again tonight that they are not mine....Amy has followed God's path...it led her from us...Becca is praying about a direction that will lead her from us.

Each and every year, my family gets more and more turned off by Halloween. Seems each year the TV commercials get scarier, bloodier, more gruesome, more dark. Seems every year we become more and more determined as a culture to celebrate all things creepy, crawly, dead, rotting, or zombie. And, as the Twilight Saga has shown us, we can even make these things "sexy."

Our Sister Lori Beard is currently traveling. Received this "blog entry" from her which she obviously did on a phone and probably after only mildly recovering from this incident she describes. Enjoy!

Seems every presidential or national-level election for the last 20 years has been touted as "The most important election in our history." How can this be?

One of the Elders, Eric Hall, that I am privileged to serve with at Corydon Baptist Church wrote this today. With his permission, it is published here.

Last week, two momentous occasions passed.

Pastor Keith has been teaching on small groups, currently known as care groups at CBC, for the past several Sundays. I am so excited because if he is teaching correctly and according to the Bible, and he is....then I have been a part of a Biblical small group for over two years. Bonnie, Ellen, and I have been meeting on Wednesdays to discuss our sin, confess our sin, read the Bible to confront sin and pray for freedom and grace for one another . We have much to learn still...that is becoming clear on Sunday nights but praise God for his beginning. I am so sinful and lost and such a good deceiver. I deceive myself and others about my sin...we all do....our enemy is the greatest deceiver of all. Pride and fear kept me enslaved to quietness over my sin for so long. And in that quietness, I struggled alone and broken. This group of three women, women who are broken vessels....women who deceive and sin...women who struggle daily...this group has changed my life. It has set me free to fight the battle against sin openly with assurrance that I'm not alone. It has given me courage to speak up...courage to live openly without my covering of fig leaves. It has brought hope to my marriage....hope to my children who are transparent now and will not live in isolation for years....hope to my relationships with other women...a living, breathing hope that cannot be taken from me. Sin has no dominion over me....when I speak it out loud, chains are broken. How could we not yearn for that. Our facebooks...our twitters...our speech are full of our right to be free...and yet when God clearly sets before us an avenue of freedom we do not pursue it....we do not run after it demanding to be a part of this blessed freedom. Small groups matter...small groups in a Biblical way are life changing....freedom giving...hope filling instruments of sanctification. Praise God for my two precious sisters...they have heard me and seen me at my worst and loved me without condition. I am thankful beyond words for God's great grace to me.

"A student is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher" (Jesus, as recorded in Luke 6:40).

I am the pastor of a Southern Baptist Church. Baptists throughout their history have distinctly held to a belief in church autonomy.