Month: January 2016

Some Bible stories are like that peculiar cousin that nobody in your family talks about. No one can deny the genetic connection and everyone hopes they don’t show up for the family reunion. There are the heroes with scandals (e.g. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David). The scoundrels who behaved heroically (e.g. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David). And, to be inclusive, the less than virtuous women (e.g. Rahab, Bathsheba, Tamar). But the stories that give good Christians the most heartburn are those where God himself does something that appears very ungodly. Like the one about Uzzah, in 2 Samuel 6. For … Read more…

In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul pens two of the most amazing verses in the Bible; amazing because they combine bare-faced honesty with bold-hearted hope. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed (vs. 8 – 9). What’s it like to be hard pressed on every side? No matter where you look, there’s trouble. Physical sickness wracks your body. Emotional turmoil troubles your heart. Mental anguish tortures your mind. Financial deficits throttle your dreams. Your relationships are just a mess. Your kids are ungrateful and … Read more…

In the summers during my high school years I was a bus mechanic’s apprentice. Ralph, the mechanic, wore thick-rimmed glasses which always sat crookedly on his nose, not because the glasses were bent but because the nose was. Ralph looked like he had taken a few punches in his youth. If you made a mistake, and even if you didn’t, he called you a knucklehead. But he had a way of saying it that made you feel he still liked you. Ralph loved the Lord, working on engines and teaching boys how to love the Lord and work on engines. On … Read more…

Once, when I was eight or nine years old, I was loafing around the spacious backyard at my grandmother’s house, looking for snakes, large insects or evidence of the UFO she said she’d seen a few weeks before. Not finding any reptiles or invertebrates, the UFO angle was looking more and more promising — an absence of creatures which scurry along the ground, to borrow a phrase from Genesis, suggests alien alteration of the environment. That, or a proliferation of cats. Mee Maw had about seventeen of them. But UFOs were a much more exciting possibility. Anyway, all of a … Read more…