Grains of Sand

“ Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours ” —1 Chronicles 29:11, NIV When man took his first step, he was charged by God with the responsibility to look after all that God had created. Genesis 2:15 tells us: “ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it ” (NIV). By the time we get to Paul’s letter to the Romans we realize the effect that sin has had, not only on mankind, but on the creation that God entrusted to him. Paul writes: “ The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth r...

Obedient as I am, I arrived exactly three hours before flight time yesterday. It took me five minutes to check-in, another five to go through security. So what was I to do with the other two hours and fifty minutes? I shopped a little, had coffee, then sat down in the lounge to wait. High above me was a television screen. Yesterday, November 9th, marked the anniversary of the day that the Berlin Wall was torn down. The interviewer was speaking to a man who had been there on the day the wall was demolished. He had escaped from East Germany and later became a border guard at the famous wall. He remarked that it always bothered him that across the barbed wire and the no-man's land, a cousin or some other family member might be facing him with a rifle in his hand. Would family or friend one day be called to exchange shots, perhaps kill? When I arrived in Caracas, all the news was about the dispute between Venezuela and Colombia. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is constantly speaking a...