Alva Review-Courier -

Saturday, as I was preparing to go to the NWOSU Ranger Family Day football extravaganza, I was unable to find my grey and white plaid Northwestern cap. I ended up wearing a Titleist hat to keep my bald spot from burning, but it just wasn’t the same. By the way, in case you’ve been living in a cave, the Rangers have now defeated two Arkansas teams in a row (RRR).

This morning, as I sat down to write this week’s article, I took off said Titleist hat and tossed it on top of the growing pile of clutter on my desktop. Two bibles, a copy of Glenn Pemberton’s introduction to the Old Testament, a philosophy textbook, several notebooks and paperbacks I have been about to read for the last year and, lo and behold, two more caps – one of which was grey and white and sported a big N on the front. Someone once said that some geniuses are absent minded. I can accept that.

This little discovery got me to thinking. I wondered how many things I’ve left lying around through the years that are still right where I left them. I decided to calculate the number of sermons I’ve preached. I came up with a conservative estimate of around 5,000 sermons. That didn’t feed my ego quite well enough. So, I multiplied the number of sermons by 23 minutes (the average length of said sermons) and came up with 115,000 minutes of sermonizing. That’s around 1,900 hours of pulpiteering or roughly 80 days of Gospel gabbing. Some would say that sitting through just one of my sermons will make you see eternity (or feel like you’ve been sitting there that long), but surely in that length of time I’ve left something lying around that’s worthy of rediscovery.

For the record, there are 29 books in the Protestant New Testament, containing 260 chapters, 7,956 verses, and (in the NIV) 138,020 words – all piled up and waiting for you to rediscover. See you Sunday.