Welcome to the Prime Timers A.B.F.

Please join us in the Payne Education center, second floor, rooms 210-212 each Sunday from 10:10 am until 10:50 am. The Prime Timers Adult Bible Fellowship is following a program from the National Council of Churches. We are currently in a 13 week section "Called to Be God's People".

Our new mentor, the Rev. Rusty Goldsmith, spoke to us this week, despite having a slight case of laryngitis.

Overcoming Grief

This is the week our Mentor the Rev. Richard Elwood began his new duties as interim Rector at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Texas. Taking over his duties is the Rev. Rusty Goldsmith, who introduced himself to the class with a short history of his involvement with the Church.

Henny Penny, our Good News Chicken,  got a dollar from George Laigle, describing the experience of cleaning out the attic and finding love letters he wrote to his wife when he was 19.  Mushy or not, this is a wonderful tribute to a love that is as strong today as it was then.

This weeks lesson was from the book of Ruth, where Ruth professes her love for her mother-in-law in the face of great hardship. Ruth is one of the shortest books in the Bible. One of Ruth's descendants is David, so her story established his ancestry. Her story also affirms the practice of levirate marriage, where if a man dies without a child, his brother marries his wife to maintain the line. It also demonstrates how a non-Israelite can become a faithful follower of God.

Jackie described how the Book of Ruth is a combination of the historical and the poetical. The famine, for instance, was real, as was the land of Moab, an unsavory place where the family was forced to move. Some of the names are word plays, such as Mahlon, which sounds like the word for disease, and Chilion, sounding like the name for perish, and Naomi changing her name to Mara, sounding like pleasant and bitter respectively.

The point of the lesson is that the story of Ruth is good reading for caregivers, as an example of faith. Perhaps all the characters in the Book of Ruth exist in you in some form.

Prime Timers Contact names and numbers

Co-Leaders

Faith Alive in 2005!

Faith Alive weekend is February 25-27. Gayle Ferguson spoke to our group about this special event.

Jackie Rose (l), one of the Prime Timers leaders and this weeks speaker, with the Rev. Rusty Goldsmith and ???.

The Lesson for Sunday, February 13 is titled "Overcoming Pride"

Key Verse:  2 Kings 5:13-14

Focus of the Lesson:  Pride is often hard to overcome. How do we overcome pride to receive the help we need? When Naaman overcame his reluctance to listen to advice, he received healing and accepted the God of Israel.

The reading is 2 Kings 5:1-5, 9-15b. This text is from the New Revised Standard Version.

1 Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the LORD had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.
2 Now bands from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman's wife. 3 She said to her mistress, "If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy."
4 Naaman went to his master and told him what the girl from Israel had said. 5 "By all means, go," the king of Aram replied. "I will send a letter to the king of Israel." So Naaman left, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of clothing.

9 So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha's house. 10 Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, "Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed."
11 But Naaman went away angry and said, "I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. 12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than any of the waters of Israel? Couldn't I wash in them and be cleansed?" So he turned and went off in a rage.
13 Naaman's servants went to him and said, "My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, 'Wash and be cleansed'!" 14 So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.
15 Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, "Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel."