We are Marshall!!!!

On November 14, 1970, a chartered jet carrying most of the Marshall University football team clips a stand of trees and crashes into a hillside just two miles from the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia. The team was returning from that day’s game, a 17-14 loss to East Carolina University. Thirty-seven Marshall football players were aboard the plane, along with the team’s coach, its doctors, the university athletic director and 25 team boosters–some of Huntington, West Virginia’s most prominent citizens–who had traveled to North Carolina to cheer on the Thundering Herd. “The whole fabric,” a citizen of Huntington wrote later, “the whole heart of the town was aboard.”

For Huntington, the plane crash was “like the Kennedy assassination,” one citizen remembers. “Everybody knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.” The town immediately went into mourning. Shops and government offices closed; businesses on the town’s main street draped their windows in black bunting. The university held a memorial service in the stadium the next day and cancelled Monday’s classes. There were so many funerals that they had to be spread out over several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players whose remains couldn’t be identified were buried together in Spring Hill Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their university.

Marshall got a new football coach–Jack Lengyel, from the College of Wooster in Ohio–and set about rebuilding the team. The NCAA gave the Thundering Herd special permission to let freshmen play on the varsity squad, and Lengyel cobbled together a ragtag group of first-years, walk-ons and the nine veteran players who hadn’t been on the plane that night. The team lost its first game of the 1971 season but–with a last-second touchdown that seemed almost too good to be true–defeated Ohio’s Xavier University 15-13 in its first home game since the crash. The Herd won one other game that season, and nine in Lengyel’s four-year tenure at Marshall, but none was as emotional as the first.

Stop and learn today from the story of Marshall.

I am so thankful for my wife who serves so many! She also has the heart of God….When she gives me ideas as to what to post…….people eat it up! Sharon knows what people are hungry for….what people’s souls are hungry for is a better way to describe it! For 2 days now she has put on Inspirational presentations! I am a blessed man to have her!

Today, thousands of Americans,  from coast to coast will gather at state capitals, city halls, parks, and churches to pray for Pastor Saeed.  Thousands more will gather in nations around the world.

Today, Pastor Saeed will have spent 365 days of  in an Iranian prison because of his Christian faith.  It is just the first year of an eight-year prison sentence – a sentence he should never have to serve.

Yesterday we reported that Billy Graham has sent the President of Iran a letter on Pastor Saeed’s behalf. Read it here: https://fggam.org/billy-graham-writes-letter-to-president-of-iran/

Let us be in prayer for the release of Pastor Saeed.

I also pray that President Obama be strong and ask for the release of Pastor Saeed

 In Jesus name, Amen!