The Precepts facilitator is taking a sabbatical this fall and, instead, the Thursday morning group plans to work through this book until Thanksgiving. The regular leader may be back by then.

I'm in the mood for a change of pace so I searched on Community Bible Study and found one in Allenwood. I registered a few weeks ago. The core leader called last week to remind me of the first class. Turns out the kids were off school (and we went to the Philadelphia Zoo) so I was unable to make the first class. I'm surprised they held it. Maybe not many participants have school-aged kids. I was invited to pick up my workbook this weekend from someone's front porch.

Allenwood isn't near my home but it's near where the kids take tennis lessons on Saturday mornings. So, this morning I dropped them off at their lesson in Manasquan and went over to Brielle to the house. I'm only vaguely familiar with the area from having taken my car to the service place on St. Rt. 35 several times years ago. And passing through to Pt. Pleasant. My GPS showed a circle for the intersections of 34, 35 and 70 but it's been upgraded to a cloverleaf several years ago. So I tried my best to follow the "directions." Thank goodness TomTom doesn't yell at me for driving on what it thinks is grass!

It just so happened that today was Brielle Day or something and there was a 10k foot race along the roads I traveled. I had to go real slow and watch for runners passing. Then, pulling into the driveway, I wondered how I would back out without hitting anyone, as runners were on both sides of the road. Fortunately, by the time I retrieved my workbook from a bag on the front porch and programmed my GPS to take me back to the kids' tennis place, a race official was at the end of the driveway ready to assist me in backing out. I appreciated that very much.

Really beautiful area down there in Brielle. The golf course was super-packed with work hard, play hard types.

The workbook contains six lessons on 1 & 2 Thessalonians. The commentary material was written by a man with degrees from Princeton, Dallas, SMU and Fuller. The materials profess to be "mainstream Christian" and with that background, there's a good chance of that. At least the author didn't spend all his time at WTS. Of course, I'd feel really great if the commentator didn't think Paul wrote 2^nd Thess. (cf. Support for Authenticity - Wiki, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor). Or make a big deal about Paul being "in the lead" despite co-authoring with Silas and Timothy. Why insist on Paul's leadership?

I finished lesson 1 in short order today. I probably have to do lesson 2 before Thursday. I absentmindedly requested a copy of the Prophets & Kings book (above) so I'll pay for/pick that up before excusing myself and heading over to Allenwood later this week.