A visitor to a small country church in Arizona once asked, "Does it ever rain in Arizona?"
A rancher quickly answered, "Yes, it does. Do you remember in the Bible where it rained for 40 days and 40 nights?"
The visitor replied, "Yes, I'm familiar with Noah's flood."
"Well," the rancher puffed up, "We got about two and a half inches of that."

1. Don't miss the boat.
2. Don't forget that we're all in the same boat.
3. Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.
4. Stay fit. When you're 600 years old, someone might ask you to do something REALLY big.
5. Don't listen to critics, just get on with what has to be done.
6. Build your future on high ground.
7. For safety's sake, travel in pairs.
8. Two heads are better than one.
9. Speed isn't always an advantage; the snails were on board with the cheetahs.
10. When you're stressed, float awhile.
11. Remember that the ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic was built by professionals.
12. Remember that woodpeckers inside are a larger threat than the storm outside.
13. No matter the storm, when you're with God there's a rainbow waiting.

WAS THERE A FLOOD? adapted from R.Digest 9/77 p. 129ff.

In 1922, an English archeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, began to dig in a desert halfway between Baghdad (capital of Iraq) and the tip of the Persian Gulf. His site was near a broken stump of what was once a mighty temple tower that marked the ancient city of Ur. What he unearthed was the remains of royal cemeteries and... a remarkable testimony to the truth of the Biblical story of the flood.

Before Woolley began his dig, scholars already possessed a list of the Kings of a kingdom called Sumer (of which Ur was a principal city). But the information recorded in that sketchy history started with kings who reigned "before the flood" and credited those pre-flood kings with an "absurd" length of life.

The First Dynasty of Ur, supposedly began shortly after "the flood," and when Woolley reached that level of excavation, no evidence of a previous kingdom lay beneath it. The workers cut through 3 feet of decomposed mud bricks, ashes and broken pottery. "And then, suddenly it all stopped," wrote Woolley. "There were no more potsherds, no ashes, only clean water laid mud."

The Arab workman at the bottom of the shaft told Woolley there was nothing more to be found and he had better go elsewhere. But Woolley was an extremely stubborn man. So the digging continued... through 8 feet of clean clay, until suddenly the workers turned up pieces of flint and fragments of pottery. Climbing down into the pit, Woolley examined the walls of clay, made some notes & commented "Well, of course, it's the flood."

Was there a flood? Not only does the Bible attest to this monumental event, but so do the legends of practically every culture on earth - even the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest and the Incas who lived high in the Peruvian Andes.

Add to this a study made by 2 oceanographic vessels in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 60's and early 70's. In extracting several long cores of sediment they found plankton that had the unique capability of revealing the amount of salt in the water and the temperature of the water at the moment that they died. Two separate studies (developed by Cesare Emiliani of the U. of Miami & by James Kennett of the U. of Rhode Island & Nicholas Shckletpn of Cambridge University) indicated a dramatic drop in the amount of salt found in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 11,000 years ago (estimate made by geochemist Jerry Stipp of the U. of Miami) - pointing powerfully towards the idea of an overwhelming flood inundating the Gulf at that time.

Ice covers all but 2.4 percent of Antarctica and buries entire mountain ranges. If this ice were to melt, the world's sea level would rise about 200 feet, leaving the Statue of Liberty in water up to her waist.