Grains of Sand

Pixabay Remember...generosity. Several times a year my father would come home from work, eat his supper, don his one-and-only suit and leave the house for an hour or so. This was unusual because my father generally only wore a suit on Sundays and to weddings and funerals. When I was a kid I remember asking him once where he was going. He smiled his conspiratorial smile and said, "To see my girlfriend." It was sometime later that I discovered that his "girlfriend" was a nurse and my father a regular blood donor! He gave blood until they finally told him that they couldn't allow him to give any more. Why he needed his Sunday suit to give blood was something I never really figured out, though I suppose he thought that what he was doing was important enough to merit his best foot forward. Dad didn't have much of this world's treasure, but what he could give he gave freely, consistently and happily. You see, generosity isn't just about money. ...

Isn't it amazing how many times you can read a verse of Scripture and still miss some important truth that lies in plain sight within it? Romans 6:23 is probably one of the best known, and most memorized, verses in the Bible, but when I read it this morning I had an "aha" moment. " For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. " The choice of words here is important. I earned, by my own efforts, the consequences of my sin. But the forgiveness of that sin was a gift. I get what I deserve, what I worked for, in the former; I am an undeserving recipient of the latter. I did the first; Christ did the last. He fixed what I broke. The choice of words is deliberate. The Lord could have simply said: "The result of sin is death" but he really wanted to drive home the idea of personal responsibility and the enormity of the grace he was offering. And I, for one, am happy to have dropped off the payroll of the first...