He was pretty excited. What young man wouldn’t be? It was the first time he would be taking the car out on the open road by himself. Sure, he had been out on the highway plenty of times before, but on those trips dad had always been with him. This time, things would be different. He was tired of waiting. That’s why he didn’t tell dad or ask for permission.

Although he thought he was ready and prepared for such an excursion, he wasn’t.

There is a very good chance that you weren’t happy with how the elections turned out this week. Somewhere along the way, at least one of the candidates you voted for did not make it.

I’m not afraid to admit that my candidate didn’t win. One of our state senators was running unopposed, so I wrote in a name. Jerry Marowsky, our 8th grade teacher. I asked Mr. Marowsky on Tuesday how his exit polling was going. I told him it was my fault. I started his campaign as I was driving to the polling place. Mr. Marowsky didn’t get enough votes. He didn’t win. Sadness and disappointment.

Years ago, I visited a couple who had worshiped with us the previous Sunday at our mission church near Ft. Knox, Kentucky. During my visit, I explained that all people are sinners. I told the couple that we can’t get to heaven by doing enough good works to make up for our bad works. We can’t compare ourselves to others, thinking they are worse sinners than us. We can’t hope that God is taking people to heaven based on our performance.

I explained that the soul who sins is the one who will die. All people will die, and all people are deserving of eternal death in hell.

In our Old Testament lesson, we heard the shocking story of Manasseh (2 Kings 21:1-15). Though he was king of God’s people, he committed every evil imaginable. His wickedness knew no bounds. He worshiped idols and put false altars in God’s temple. He practiced witchcraft. He “made his son pass through the fire” which means he sacrificed his son on an altar. Tradition says he had the prophet Isaiah sawn in half. King Manasseh led God’s people into such apostasy that their sin was worse than the nations that God had driven out of the land.

This is the time of the year when farmers begin harvesting their corn. One of the least fun jobs for my sisters and me growing up on the farm was going out to help our dad fix the corn picker in 40-degree weather. Inevitably, something on the corn picker would break while he was harvesting at night. Our dad would come in the house and say that he needed one of the three of us to come outside to hold the flashlight.

My wife, Shelley, and I took our high school senior, Lydia, to Kalamazoo, Michigan on Monday for a tour of Western Michigan University. She wants to go to Western Michigan to become an airline pilot. As part of our tour we scheduled lunch with the WELS campus pastor. At lunch, Pastor Timmermann asked Lydia is she ever had any questions of crisis; anything that caused her to doubt her faith; anything that made her question God.

Pastor Timmermann will make a good campus pastor for Lydia. He isn’t afraid to allow the college students to question God, to dig deeper into their faith, to build upon their knowledge from Catechism classes.

As we get older and have more life experience, we learn to not always take things at face value. We want to know more and go deeper. We begin asking questions.

I was speaking with my dad earlier this week about his farm. Since I am the executor of my parents’ will, I wanted to see how much they thought their 53 acres, farmhouse, barns, sheds and farm machinery are worth.

We came up with a total of 1.25 million dollars.

My dad said he will never sell the farm. My mom heard 1.25 million dollars and called out, “I’ll sell!”

Halloween is coming soon. Hopefully our children will be able to go trick-or-treating this year. If we have trick-or-treaters, I encourage you not to do what the woman in Fargo, North Dakota did a few years ago.

Please understand that she had the best of intentions. But it didn’t come across that way. She decided she would give “moderately obese” trick-or-treaters a letter instead of candy. In that letter she encouraged the children’s parents to be responsible in helping their young ones to stay fit and ready for life.

The submarine doors slam shut. The klaxon horn sounds, and the skipper gives the order, "Dive! Dive! Dive!" Diesel engines firing, propellers whirling, they descend into the depths, safe from enemy attack. That was submarine life aboard the USS Finback stationed in the South Pacific Ocean during World War II. It was their tenth patrol, and so most of the crew was accustomed to this way of life, but for the five airmen that they had just rescued this way of life would take some getting used to.

God promised Abraham that he would not destroy Sodom if he found ten righteous people there. He did not find them. Sodom was destroyed. Do we ever wonder if God would be able to find ten righteous people here in America, the new Sodom?

It is clear that we are no longer living in a Christian country. Christianity is dying here, and dying rapidly. God promises that the Christian faith can never pass away from the world, but it can be rejected by people and nations. People cannot remove Christ from the universe, but they can remove Christ from themselves. A nation cannot chase the Church from the face of the earth, but it can chase Christ from its borders.