From: Tom Cook
To: Recipients
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 10:55 PM
Subject: Tom's update - December 2010: A special gift to you and to the world
Dear prayer friends,
In case you hadn't noticed, the last several letters have all gone out on the 20th of the month or close to it. I'm feeling like it would be a good target for me to make any future reports/prayer requests only at those times. (All of my prior prayer letters can be seen at this link if you wish to review any: http://www.tomsgoodfiles.com/mystorymenu.php)
But this month I simply want to present to you a special gift. The best series of messages I've ever heard preached from the book of Proverbs came into my hands a long time ago, and I now can share them with the world! I actually wanted to do this starting back in 1999 when I acquired them, but it got put on hold due to many trials increasing in my life. These are SO good that it's been a dream and vision of mine to somehow (someday) get them available. This was before broadband internet became common, but when I chose the web domain "TomsGoodFiles.com" in 2006, it WAS with this eventuality in mind. I've now been able to do this, even though my trial-season isn't quite over yet.
I've only heard a fraction of them (4 of them while I was there in person, then about 30 more this fall), but I look forward to hearing all 176 of them! Here's the link to this new page at my website:
http://www.tomsgoodfiles.com/proverbsSeries.php
It may take you years to hear them all (just like it took them 5 years to preach them), but it will be greatly worth your time. Many are comfortably under 45 minutes. (They had the limitation of the back side of a 90 minute cassette, so he needed to stay concise.) Proverbs 4:7 says, "Wisdom is the principal thing; Therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding." Proverbs and these messages about them are extremely practical and may change your life in many ways! Especially as so much of the meat of these comes out in the form of Pastor Bradley's own struggles to apply God's wisdom to his own life.
That's the only news I wish to share for now. Ephesians 4:11-12 says, "And He gave some as ... pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ..." I feel strongly that Pastor Bradley is very much one of these gifts to the church, both to his local congregation and to the world. The breadth of his ministry seems to be limited largely to the small congregation he's been leading for years (and to the next generation after him), but now at least this major and definable chunk of it can spread wherever there is the internet.
I'll include further details of how this came about after my signature, if you're interested. But regardless, the news of the availability of this incredible series is all I'm sharing with you this time.
Enjoy these, my friends!
Sincerely,
Tom Cook
(407) 897-4063
TomCook @ TomsGoodfiles.com
One day, QRA exams will be as commonplace as dental exams.
Most disease will be gone. Will you hasten the day?
See how I got involved. Visit--> www.TomsGoodFiles.com
And especially www.TomsGoodFiles.com/faq.php
Further details: The few of you receiving this who were with me in the Orangewood Church singles group in Sept. of '98 (we were meeting that summer in the fellowship hall), might vaguely remember me reporting that I was very excited about the fact that I had just been to Tennessee to videotape a small annual conference as had been my habit since '91. And after the conference (which was always very good), I would always stay and visit one of the churches all Sunday before the big drive back to Fla. on Monday. Each year on Sunday night, the pastor of the particular PCA church I chose to visit (of the 3 churches involved) preached from the book of Proverbs. It was amazing! I had earlier come to love Proverbs through Bill Gothard's ministry back in the 70s, which ministry itself was overwhelmingly life-changing for me. But this was something else! It was the first time I had heard anyone from a thoroughly reformed posture give extended teaching from Proverbs. And each year I went up (starting about '94) he was STILL in Proverbs. It was great, it was inspiring, it was super practical, and I was hungry to hear it all. By my visit in '98, they had finished it months before. I found out they had recorded them all. I found myself humbly asking them if I could pretty please borrow them all to digitize them and somehow share them. It had been 11 months since they finished them, plus they had known me these 8 years or so, so they entrusted them to me as I carted all these boxes of cassettes to Florida. My excitement at our Orangewood meeting was that I now had these hot messages in my "hot little hands" and eventually everyone (potentially) would be able to enjoy them. That's the last you all (at Orangewood) would have heard of the matter.
Then behind the scenes, the grueling task began. It involved learning about audio capture, replacing my sound card 6 times until I found one that was adequate, and lots of lost hours due to having to redo many of the captures. I did a lot of equalization testing so as to engineer them to improve listening quality beyond mere straight copying. It took me many months to get through them all, and there did come a point where their church tape guy's patience with me was taxed.
But I finally got them finished for the most part, compressed, and safely stored away on CD-R disks which were just becoming popular at the time. (And of course, I safely mailed the library of cassettes back to the TN church.) My vision at that time (when we had Windows 95 and no broadband internet) was to somehow get them all onto a few of some kind of compressed CD-R disks that anyone could pop into their computer and listen to without having to have 176 regular audio CDs. MP3 was just starting to be viable.
Various struggles came further into my life, making my listening to them (or doing anything else with them for that matter) take a back burner indefinitely. Then came 2006/7 and my agonizing and protracted time of suffering (and terrifying brushes with suicide), and 2 years later TomsGoodFiles.com was gradually born out of all this adversity. My web-logs reveal that while traffic is still relatively low, I'm getting visitors from all over the nation and even from other countries. Based on letters I get, some people are either very curious and want to learn about this QRA thing. Or they're already excited about QRA and are thrilled to have the site as a resource for aiding them in their own respective journeys away from nearly all chronic disease and quickly toward the spectacular health that is now possible. Even practitioners are using it to improve their own QRA knowledge and practice, and are passing it on to many of their own patients.
And now the circumstances have become right to add back into the mix the original reason for my site's existence. Praise the Lord! Here again is the link to these amazing expositions of the book of Proverbs:
http://www.tomsgoodfiles.com/proverbsSeries.php
And if that's not enough, I already had out there Pastor Bradley's 5-message series on Imprecatory Prayers. They too are the best treatment I've ever heard on that particular subject. (Actually, they're the ONLY treatment I've heard on that subject. Ha!)
http://www.tomsgoodfiles.com/imprecatoryPrayers.php
Next month, as very strange twists in the road have come my way since my last letter, I'll fill you in on those. Definitely matters for prayer AND praise! (At least so far.)
--TC