Category: Newsletter

(This month we have a guest columnist: my youngest brother, Curt Tyra. Curt is an engineer for Allison Transmission in Indianapolis, serves as an elder in Gray Road Baptist Church, and is one of the finest men I’ve ever known in my life. When I grow up, I want to be like him. Curt wrote this article for Gray Road’s newsletter, and I thought it was worth sharing with you. And yes, I got his permission. I told him I might even give him credit. So here’s the article. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did. – Pastor David)

The old hymn that my grandparents sang said, “When the saved of earth shall gather over on the other shore, and the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”  The roll call imagined in this song would be from a perfect listing of the true followers of Christ.

Contrast this roll with the membership roll of any local church, and you will find yourself confronted with some harsh realities.  While the membership of a given church may be made up of many true believers, the reality of our experience and the testimony of Scripture is that unbelievers can slip into our fellowship unnoticed.Read More

Someone recently said to me: “You used to show pictures and put the Scriptures up on the screen as you preached. Would you please do that again?” I felt very conflicted when I was asked this, and I’d like to explain to you why.

I always have tried to do something a little special, a little out of the ordinary, when it comes to Christmas and Easter services. In part it’s because preachers are faced with telling “the old, old story” without telling it the same old way every year. When those wonderful seasons start approaching, preachers start asking each other: “What are you doing for Christmas?”, or “What are you doing for Easter?” We’re always looking for fresh, new ideas to help proclaim the message of the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection.Read More

I started playing the guitar when I was ten years old. My parents bought me my first guitar for Christmas that year. It came from Woolco, and cost the princely sum of $39.95! I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world…for a while. After about a year I began to realize just how hard to play my Woolco guitar really was. In those days inexpensive guitars were mainly “instruments of torture”.

I’d look at other guitars when I went shopping with my parents. They used to sell guitars and amplifiers at Sears and other department stores. These instruments also weren’t very expensive—or very good—but they sure were fun to look at. Back then, I thought that the more buttons and knobs a guitar had, the better it was.Read More

One of the things that amazed me after my shoulder surgery was how fast I lost muscle in my right arm. I would look in the mirror and think, “Good grief! I can’t believe how skinny that arm is compared to the other one!” As much as I enjoyed the medically-induced rest after my surgery, it came with a price. Inaction leads to loss of strength. In my case, it was prescribed and intentional, but the consequences were still the same. It really is true: move it or lose it. I didn’t move my shoulder and my arm for a while, and as a consequence I became significantly weaker.

I’ve been going through physical therapy, first to get back the range of motion, then to regain the strength that my arm had before. And it’s been a long and sometimes arduous process.

At first it didn’t hurt at all. The physical therapist would gently move my arm through a limited range of motion. All I had to do was lay there; the therapist did all the work.Read More

I’ve always had trouble going to sleep. It seems like it takes me forever.  I couldn’t begin to count the times I’ve looked at the clock at 2:00, 3:00 or even 4:00 in the morning. Even as a small child I can remember lying awake at night while all the rest of my family was asleep, crying because I couldn’t drift off.

I think I get it honest. My grandfather could sit down or lie down and go to sleep whenever he wanted. But my grandmother had difficulty getting and staying to sleep. As a teenager I would stay all night at their house and stay up to watch the late show. Grandma would get up about every hour or hour and a half, for one reason or another. She called it “prowling”. She had various explanations: “I can’t sleep.” “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” Or my favorite: “My stomach’s upset. I need to drink some buttermilk.” (I never understood that one. Frankly, drinking buttermilk doesn’t settle my stomach.)Read More

The Bible says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14a) I usually take that fact for granted until something goes wrong in my body.

My mother used to say. “I don’t mind getting old, except the parts wear out.” I’m beginning to understand what she meant. As I write this, I am preparing to have arthroscopic surgery on my right shoulder. After a series of tests, x-rays and an MRI scan, they determined that I have torn the rotator cuff in my shoulder almost all the way through. People ask me, “How did you do that?” I wish I could point to some manly injury, but the truth is I don’t know how I did it. I guess the parts just wore out.

I didn’t even know what a rotator cuff was until I started having shoulder pain. Among other things, it hurt to lift my arm. For a while I tried to follow the advice of the doctor on the old Hee Haw show: “If it hurts when you do that, don’t do that!” But the pain kept getting worse. So I started reading about the shoulder.Read More

Three and a half years ago, young pastor Saeed Abedini was unjustly arrested while visiting his native Iran.

Saeed was born in Iran, but converted from Islam to Christianity and moved to the United States. He married a girl named Nagmeh, whose family was also from Iran. Nagmeh was a Christian, too. Eventually Saeed became a U. S. citizen and a pastor. He and Nagmeh settled in Boise, Idaho, and a daughter, Rebekka, and a son, Jacob, were born to them.

But Saeed was burdened for his own Iranian people, and would periodically return to Iran to help establish house churches and tell Iranians about Jesus Christ. The government of Iran took a dim view of this and warned him to stop.Read More

Way back in the late eighties (remember them?), the Christian band I was in decided to make a demo tape of some of our songs. We couldn’t begin to afford a recording studio, but one of us had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so we went amateur all the way. We recorded at a band member’s house in Terre Haute, starting on Friday evening and planning on recording most of Saturday. So that we could work as late as possible on Friday, and get started as early as possible on Saturday, they asked if I could stay Friday night with another friend of the band’s in Terre Haute. This sounded better to me than driving back and forth from Coal City twice on Friday and Saturday, so I agreed.

In those days I was in an inner turmoil about a lot of things. Rae Anne and I had been married just over ten years; we had two young children we were raising; and, as the Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11:28, “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”…though in my case it was only the one church I was pastoring. All these things tended to weigh on my heart, especially at night.Read More