Songs In The Night

Introduction To God’s Magnificent Sevens One thing that has intrigued me the last few years in my Bible studying especially is all the sevens that I and others have found in the Bible. Of course, we all know the mainstream ones people talk about, such as Jesus’ seven I Ams in the Gospel of John; Jesus’ seven sayings from the cross; the seven churches, seals, trumpets and vials in the book of Revelation. Even though the word seven and sevens occur 54 times in Revelation, there are countless more, such as a word or phrase occurring seven times in that book (or a multiple of seven, which has the same symbolic meaning), seven people or groups in view, a passage having seven things happening in it, a sevenfold list given, seven names or types of statements, a sevenfold approach to the whole book. We can also find all of these and so many more in the Bible as a whole. Sevens (or a multiple of that number) means completion or perfection in the Bible. Often it is used to show a complete range ...

I have been wanting to put my poetry books together as ebooks or PDFs for a while now, but the methods I used before had their quirks - weird links and info on the sides or top and bottom of the books, and the format was often broken up when converted to PDF by someone's browser or ereader. Recently, I came across this website ( printfriendly.com ) that easily converts your documents or files to PDFs - basically just drag and drop, then rename the file as you'd like. One of the things I was unsatisfied with when my second poetry book was printed up was that I had written a poem for my Mom, two days before she passed away, but I could not include it in that book because it was already at the printers. Now, as an ebook/PDF, I was easily able to add it to this edition of the book. Lord willing, if I am ever able to print any of these books up again, I will include it in the physical book. For ebook/PDFs, click on the links below to download the zip files, which you just need to un...

  Poems Presented In Church In 2021 to 2022, for about 10 months in the two main Sunday services, I presented poems in church as a ministry. Usually I shared an introduction to the poem (perhaps the story behind it if it was one of mine or if I knew of the events surrounding it), then I presented the verses behind it and a Biblical exhortation to draw closer to the Lord.  While we were recording the sermons preached each service, we did not think to actually record the poem presentations until about the last four months. The poems were a blessing to share and God's hand was definitely upon that ministry, as the poems and challenges I read often went with the theme of the sermons preached, the songs chosen, and many times both - yet the hymns chosen each day and the Pastor's themes or passages were not announced to me in advance. It was a ministry wholly dependent upon the Lord's guiding, and His hand was very evident for all those months. For various reasons, the Lord guide...

I wanted to try something new, so I created two new blogs. One new blog, called  The Substance Of Things Hoped For (Faith-based Stories and Illustration) , was created for a place for me to be able to quickly repost all the stories and illustrations that Angela Trenholm (my webpartner) had on her family site (Trenholms Of Kelowna).  EarnestlyContending.com  (our domain and the central hub for all our personal sites) got repeatedly hacked a little over two years ago and we lost all the content and had to rebuild from scratch. It is a lot of work trying to repost articles, stories, songs, etc. that were posted from approximately 21 years ago onwards, but I am making a valiant effort. Doing it in a blog format also gives me the opportunity to easily add new content. The second blog is for posting Daily Devotionals once again - devotionals and poems. I had done that for several years back in 2004 onwards, but eventually it became too much work to keep doing that project and w...

About one and a half years ago, I stumbled across a wonderful songwriter and poet named Deborah Bolack. The lyrics of her songs and the devotional book she put together have been such a blessing to me. The songs that she has recorded and her visitors can listen to on her blog have been beautiful and edifying. But this year she has blessed me more than I could have ever imagined - twice! She composed music for two of my songs (one in June, and one just a few weeks ago). I cannot read music, so had no clue how wonderful the music she made was - until I got to hear both songs played at the Gospel Mission where I work. My heart was touched and a long-standing dream of mine was fulfilled - to hear something of mine played, and have sheet music available so that others can use it too. There have been a couple of songs I have written to existing music (such as from a hymn). One that I cowrote with Angela Trenholm and one of her daughters was used as the theme song for a Bible or Mission'...