Hello again and welcome to the program. We're here in our series with the land of hills and valleys. Deuteronomy 11, 11 says for the land, whether thou go in to possess it is not as the land of Egypt from whence he came out. But the land, whether you go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys. I'm going to swing back to 1942. The headline news then was that the Second World War was raging. William Lyon Mackenzie King was the Prime Minister of Canada. Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States. Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And a madman named Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany. During the month of May, German U-boats were operating in the area of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. They had penetrated the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River. 22 Canadian merchant vessels and warships were sunk and 249 lives were lost. Walt Disney was introducing his animated film Bambi, Bing Crosby was crooning about a white Christmas, and on December 21, 1942, William Lyon Mackenzie King announced that butter was being rationed in Canada because of the war. Well, there was something else that happened that did not make headline news. Ken and May Kirkland were announcing to their friends, who visited them at the Grace Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, that they had a little boy, and they named him Robert Douglas Kirkland. And this is where my story begins. If mom and dad wanted to buy a new car to take me home from the hospital, it cost them about $900. They didn't have a new car. They had a 1929 Model A Ford. They could purchase gasoline for their Ford for 15 cents a gallon. A new house would cost them around $3,500, or they could rent one for $35 a month. They were poor, so they had none of those things. However, they might have spared five cents for a bottle of Coca-Cola on the way home. By the time I was three years of age, my family had moved to Ajax, Ontario, where my dad was the foreman of a large sheep farm. I have a lot of fond memories of that period of my life. I'll not bore you with those stories. However, one thing I do remember was learning how very stupid sheep are. The Lord did not do us a favor when he likened us unto sheep. One time they were unloading a boxcar load of sheep and they put the ramp down to the ground from the boxcar and the sheep, of course, would come down. They took a plank, a two-by-six plank, and stood it upright at the bottom of the ramp. As the sheep came down, they had to jump over the plank. After a while, when a few sheep had jumped over the plank, they took the plank away, and every single sheep that was on that boxcar jumped over a plank that wasn't there. God did not do us a favor when he likened us to sheep. We need a shepherd. Headline news in 1955, the Race for Space was underway, the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened, Disneyland opened in California, and God We Trust was added to all U.S. paper currency. The first pocket transistor radio was introduced, and the McDonald's fast food restaurant was underway. The first Guinness Book of World Records was published, and the Mickey Mouse Club made its debut on television. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the Montgomery bus boycott. The rock and roll craze was in full swing. Winston Churchill resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The average wage was now around $4,000 a year and the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour. Houses had jumped to $11,000 or you could rent one for about $90 a month. New cars now sold for less than $2,000 and gasoline had soared to 33 cents a gallon. By this time our family had left the sheep farm and had moved to a small village in the country. It had a one-room country school with 30 students ranging from grade 1 to grade 8. There was a gas station, a post office that operated out of someone's house, and a little tiny grocery store that also operated out of someone's house. Dad had started a new job as a welder in a factory and with that job came new friends and a lot more money than he ever had before. He started going to the hotel with his new friends and he was very popular among them. They nicknamed him the Farmer because he had recently worked on a farm. At first he only drank with his friends on the weekend. Then they started going to the hotel every night after work. He would get drunk, come home and argue with my mother. Our home was in shambles. I remember Dad getting so upset with Mom that he threw his plate of food at her. I can still see that spaghetti sliding down the wall. Deuteronomy 11.11 talks about leaving the land of Egypt and going into a land of hills and valleys. In October 1955, God did a marvelous thing. Myself, my brother, my mother, and my dad were born again, and our lives completely changed. It was a miracle. Once again, Deuteronomy 1111, For the land whither thou goest in to possess it is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, but the land whither ye go to possess is a land of hills and valleys. Be sure and be with us for our next message as we look at an adventure in Christian living in a land of hills and valleys. you