Grains of Sand

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...

I'm not sure why I have always had a fascination for books about war—fiction and non-fiction. Could it be that my latent aggression needs some way to express itself? I'd like to think it is more due to some uncanny ability born in me that recognizes that life is a battle. I'd like to think that, honest, though the first statement might be truer. When I read this morning's verses I was reminded again that the believer's war is not with sticks or stones, rifles, tanks, submarines, or fighter jets. The believer's war is an internal spiritual battle with physical expressions. Paul writes: " For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ " —2 Corinthians 10...