You had me worried there for a minute. You will do just great!

I am confident you can do it!

No problem--keep it simple and be yourself. Maybe a quick story about how God keeps you safe and health, or bit of history of the area/church? Just glance thru a study guide, Bible and pick a subject. As for the kids, our pastor usually brings something that she can relate to the lesson--like a rock, soil (related to farming), pictures of clouds (weather related). She also may ask the kids simple questions--like how can you help your folks around the houes, shopping and then uses their answers. By the way she has no children of her own. Just sit down in your quiet area, and just list a few things YOU are interested in and go from there. Do wish you the best.
Marie (ND)

you got it! you won't need it though!

Will add you to my prayers also OJ, but like Kat says, you will not need it. You will be fine!

You'll be fine. Your heart is in the right place, Joyful, and that will carry you through.

As others have said, you'll do fine and give a great message, but good thoughts and prayers are coming your way, just the same.

You are up to the challenge -- I know it!

Don't scare us like that, Joyful! You'll do great!!

A Prayer for Assistance

O Thou Whose face is the object of my adoration, Whose beauty is my sanctuary, Whose habitation is my goal, Whose praise is my hope, Whose providence is my companion, Whose love is the cause of my being, Whose mention is my solace, Whose mearness is my desire, Whose presence is my dearest wish and highest aspiration, I entreat Thee not to withhold from me the things Thou didst ordain for the chosen ones among Thy servants. Supply me, then, with the good of this world and of the next.

Thou, truly, art the King of all men. There is no God but Theee, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Generous.
-- Baha'u'llah

Blessed is the spot, and the house, amd the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified.
--- Baha'u'llah

I've been thinking about you, Ed, and wondering how you were feeling about doing this. I sure hope nothing stops me from going on Sunday. I wasn't there last sunday.
I'm anxious to listen to what you have to say. The childens story may be the hardest, as there is such a difference in ages and sometimes only a couple there and sometimes maybe 10 or so.

I know you will do wonderfully and support you 100%. Have faith in your wonderful abilities.

Adding my prayers but know you will be fine!

Go get 'em, Ed. You'll do great!

Of course you'll be fine, Joyful. Just pretend that you're talking to us!

Prayers for you anyway.

Jemdandy - I love those Bahai prayers...

Should I tell the kids how we used to bathe on Saturday night ... in a tin tub ... behind the stove ... and, having no girls to worry about, didn't have to suffer the males being banned from the kitchen during such?

No running water ... no bathroom ... no hot water except dipped from a reservoir on the stove? But we did have electricity.

But lots of work on Dad's (rather large) farm, when, at age 10 (couple of brothers younger), the hired hands all went off to fight in World War II?

(Maybe take in a rock, to see whether I can put it into my head).

Maybe some tomato (or strawberry) seeds, hiding the pic on the package, to ask them if they've ever seen something like that ... and when I tell them what it is, most likely they'll remember having seen them ...

... there's a lot of promise in a seed.

There's a lot of promise in a kid.

Maybe sometimes they should talk to some of the older folks gathered in the church, to find out how their promise turned out.

o j

I'll be thinking of you in the morning, OJ. But I know you'll do just fine all on your own. On suggestion--keep it simple, keep it short. They will love you for both!

Your early life sounds a lot like mine, except we had no hydro, either. I had no brothers or sisters, a mother who was real sick from the time I was ten but did all and more than she could/should. My father was sick in bed for 5 weeks during harvest time when I was twelve. We had no tractor. We had horses, chickens, hens, pigs cows to milk, calves to feed,etc. and no one to help. I learned very young what hard and heavy work was all about.

Yes, the Saturday night baths were the same in the square metal laundry tub. I remember when I wasn't all that old, being in the tub in the kichen/dining room and a knock coming at the door. My parents each grabbed a handle on the tub and carried me out into the pantry.

Lot of good memories.

A city friend asked me, not all that long ago, if I thought I had missed a great deal by living in the country. I just stared at her, speechless. I feel I had the best of eveything - nature, animals, sunsets and sunrises, the birth of new creatures - animals and chickens, a dog that loved me and I loved back, and cats and kitties? What in the world did I miss????

joyfulguy:

Go ahead and tell about Saurday night baths. Its part of our heritage that happened not so long ago, but might seem primitive by today standards.

My sister and I with our 2 parents lived in a small 4 room house on a small farm in southern Illinois. Electricity did not reach these farms until 1947. During the 1940s, my sister and I bathed in a No.3 galvanized wash tub placed behind the kitchen stove to afford a screen. (Be careful not to back into the kitchen stove if it was fired up.) Water came from a pitcher pump at the kitchen sink. It drew water from a cistern. The cistern was replenished by rain water from the roof of the house. (We prayed for rain when the cistern ran low.)

Water wss heated on the kitchen stove. The stove also contained a copper water tank that eventually heated 5 to 10 gallons of water. On hot summer nights, water may have been heated outside in another tub at the clothes washing site.

We bathed on Saturday night so that we'd be fresh for church the next morning. That was the only scheduled bath of the week. In summer, just before supper, we might go the swimming hole in the river; It was only 1/4 mile from the house. That was a great way to rinse the sweat off and cool down.

In 1947 after electric powewr came to the countryside (REA), the bathing routine did not change due to practicalities. After I entered high school in 1950, I got a shower every day at the end of the physical Ed class. That became my source of bathing (and athlete's foot).

You probably should save the descriptions of outhouses for another time, but those were part of the landscape.
Farm houses built in 1900 did not have plumbing. If you were out in a field, you went behind a bush. (My uncle cautioned me: "Do not squat with your spurs on!")

All sounds so very very fmiliar. We got hydro in 1948 but that did not give us indoor plumbing or indoor bathroom or a furnace until much later. We also had a cistern and the rainwater was wonderful - not hard. Also had another well that gave us the drinking water. That was from water that soaked through the ground and got purified that way. We had a very deep well, called a rock well for the farm animals and a pump on it, run by a gas engine when needed to fill a big water tank from which the animals drank.
I know I've got off topic here.

Will see you and listen to you this morning if I hurry up and get off the computer.

Told the story of the seeds, asking the young ones if they'd seen those two kinds before, and they allowed as how they hadn't.

I didn't take the packages in, but told them the tiny ones were from a small red fruit with green on top that most of us eat (strawberry), then told them that the larger ones were from a lager red fruit, which we often call a vagetable, which I'm sure that they've eaten - to check what's inside the next tomato that they eat.

Also told I'd like to take them with me on an imaginary journey of what my life was like on the farm when I was about their age.

No one was eight years old ... but one was seven, and I said that when he got to be eight, that I've been around (and here I started counting on my fingers) ... ten times that long. And during the time that I was counting, I berated myself, asking what was going on - that this old man was counting on his fingers.

Told them of the water issues, that we hadn't had water on tap, and hot water heated on the stove ...

... and of a walk through several back rooms to a privy attached to the house ... in summer, with a seat in an upstairs bedroom in winter.

Later explained to the adults that I wasn't asking for sympahy, but just to illustrate that we've come a long way in a generation and a half or two, and that I feel that we in the western world are going to need to learn how to live more simply, again, in future.

Running out of time at the library (if not out of gas).

ole joyful