Grains of Sand

Pixabay “ Praise be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. ” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5) Reading these verses reminded me of a life experience that a missionary colleague shared with me some years ago. She and her husband were serving overseas. They were expecting their first child—actually children plural. She was carrying triplets. The babies, all boys, were perfect when they were born. But none of them survived. She was RH negative, and the medical personnel were unaware, or unprepared, for the implications of that reality during her pregnancy or when the babies were born. I asked her what that terrible tragedy meant to her as she looked back on it years later. Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 1...

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. ...

Pixabay It was, to my mind, an unfortunate choice of title. A very popular author has published a 12-day devotional entitled Making Sense of God . I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he probably didn't think through the implications of that title: what it suggests about him and what it suggests about God. If he had written six volumes of 2,000 pages each on the subject he still would not have met the mandate suggested in that title. It wouldn't put a dent in our understanding of God. A 12-day devotional doesn't cut it and to suggest that it could is presumptuous even if the author really didn't mean it. Isaiah sums it up: " 'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts' " (Isaiah 55:8, 9). Paul follows up with this in Romans 11:33, " Oh, the depths of the...

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...