Saratoga Springs… (Wednesday, August 16, 2006)

is an especially beautiful town. We danced all day and made friends with a couple from Turkey and three local girls. They stayed with us for hours. We met more people toward evening and watched a beautiful sunset while eating a wonderful dinner together in Congress Park, sharing our food with several guests that happened by. By the time darkness fell, our bus Peacemaker II was filled with many curious visitors wanting to know the secret of our life together. We sang to them some of our favorite songs like Cherishing the Life We Share and If I Could Have all the Riches of this World, which continues on to say, “I would not be satisfied… but there is something of great value to me.”

A young man sat on our bus for hours, watching and listening to everything going on around him. He opened up about his life and how all of his friends are destroying and some have already destroyed their lives with drugs. He wishes he could be set free from that. He soberly told us that he could take us anywhere within a mile of there and show us hundreds of drug dealers. He sees how everyone in the world is in bondage and “enslaved to sin,” but how we live in a place where we are free.

This is why the One we follow said in His Word to make disciples of all men teaching them to observe all that He commanded. How do you do that? There has to be a viable witness of a life of obedience to His commands—not outward compliance to laws engraved on tablets of stone, but an inward response from a deep relationship with Him, from the heart. That is what true freedom is about, being relinked to the One who created us in the first place.

His commands set us free from a life of living for your self, bondage to self, selfishness, self-centeredness. Me, me, me, the fatal flaw of all mankind. Who cannot relate to it?

It is a life that overflows in love for one another expressed in mutual respect, care, and peace, culminating in joy, thus… the Merrymakers!

Singing to our friends

We finally tore ourselves away from our new friends, hoping to see them at our festival in nearby Cambridge, NY on the 26th of August.

More coming soon!!!