Grains of Sand

Google Images Death is all around us. Yesterday’s terrible events in the Navy yard in Washington once again illustrate too graphically that we are a society in deep trouble. Twelve people are dead because someone snapped and was unable to come up with a better way to solve his problems than to take an arsenal of weapons and to kill everything in sight. The doctor at the trauma centre who helped to treat the wounded spoke passionately about the need to do something to stop this senseless waste of life. Gun control is a sensitive issue. It’s a messy issue. It’s a political death sentence for the authorities brave enough to deal with it. But in the end, how does the death of ambition stack up against the death of the innocent? Unhappily, even the strictest gun control is not enough to guarantee life. Yes, death is all around us. But life is the subject of Jesus’ remarks in John 10. However death happens to us, in Christ, that fleeting moment is just a last bump in the road before ...

Google Images Some people might call that last week before His death, the beginning of the end for Jesus. In fact, it was more like the beginning of the beginning. Beyond the cross lay a whole new life, exemplified by the Lord Himself when He came back from among the dead. Here, in Matthew 21, we have described for us the Lord's entrance into the City of Jerusalem at the beginning of that last week. Traditionally, we call it the "triumphal entry" though riding in on a donkey and having the path strewn with tree branches and cloaks somehow doesn't quite compare to say, Queen Elizabeth riding in state in her golden carriage on the way back from her coronation. And the Lord's fans turned out to be a whole lot more fickle than the Queen's have been. But if I'd been that donkey... If I'd been able; dull, stubborn creature than I am as that donkey, to articulate what I knew, how I felt, even the Queen's majestic procession would have paled in compari...