A few years ago Steve was invited to appear with Elder Don Schneider, the NAD President, on the television show, “Really Living”. Here is the link to watch it. We just found the link today.

The eighth annual Morning Song National Christmas Tour has come to a close. What a great tour. The venue, the hosts, the promoters, the pastors and their churches were all wonderful. We’ll never forget the wonderful time of music and ministry we had. You can view all the picture from three of our concerts at our Smugmug photo site.

In October I was happy to be able to take my son, Alan, with me to Washington, DC for the concerts at the Pentagon and US Senate – each, just two days apart.  Alan has been running sound for me since he was 6 years old.  But his greatest talent is photography.  He has a successful photography business called ADP or Alan Darmody Photography, specializing in wedding photography.  If you’d like to see some of the photos he took of our nation’s capitol, CLICK HERE.

The Washington Monument

On October 22 Steve and son Alan entered the Pentagon at 6am to allow sufficient time for passing through security.  Met by Colonel Bill “Whiz” Broome, Steve and Alan were escorted to the auditorium inside the walls of the Pentagon to prepare for the concert.  What a thrill it was to be there, to visit with Whiz, whom I pastored with in south Georgia 30 years ago, and to meet the men and women who walk the halls of the Pentagon.  About 60 people came for the Prayer Breakfast and concert.  Afterward, Colonel Broome presented to Steve and American Flag flown over the Pentagon with a letter of documentation and appreciation for the concert.  Pictures tell the story.  CLICK TO VIEW PICTURES.

Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.

A. Lincoln, October 3, 1863.