Monday, March 28, 2016

Star of the Sea

Years ago before GPS and smartphones there were limited resources in finding your route, or worse, where you happened to be. The most obvious one was landmarks.

(This annoyed me when I moved to Fishers because everyone gave me directions based on landmarks that no longer exist. "Turn right at the old Lowe's." How do I know where that is if it's gone now?)

But sailors had a more difficult time. There are no landmarks. Just open water. So to find their location and their direction they would use the stars. Points in the sky that are consistent and act as an interstaller map. The most obvious being Polaris, the north star. Find it and you know that direction is north.

A few months ago in my reading I discovered that the name Mary means "Star of the Sea." Some believe this was done on purpose, the Son of God was given to a woman with this name because He would be the star of the sea for all mankind, Someone who they can look to and find direction.

In what seems to be a season of chaos in our world right now, do you know to look to the Star of the Sea for direction...?

T

Monday, March 21, 2016

"Yesterday's Amazing is Today's Ordinary"

Our daughter has become slightly obsessed with the movie "Charlotte's Web" where this line is from. I've heard it about five times in the last three days. But although it is about a fictitious spider's spelling it really does still hold true in our world.

Think about all the things that were amazing, even imaginary, a century ago. Household electricity, running water, flight, internet, wifi, phones everywhere, foods from around the world. All these things were at one point amazing. Now, if we drop a call or a flight is delayed we get annoyed. Why? Because it's ordinary, it should happen. We expect it.

That's the challenge for this weekend. The story of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection are amazing, but have we heard it so often that it is now ordinary?

Make sure to take some time this week to think about it... and make it amazing again...

T

Monday, March 14, 2016

Moving God

The other night I was reading the story of Balaam in the book of Numbers. It's always a fun story, who doesn't love a talking donkey...

But I started looking at the next part of the story. The reason Balaam's donkey talked to him was King Balak wanted Balaam to curse the Israelites and God didn't Balaam to (obviously). So the story goes that King Balak takes Balaam up on a hill so he can see the Israelites and asks for a curse, but instead Balaam blesses them, because that's what God told him to say.

Here's where it got interesting for me. King Balak, not happy about this of course. So what he does next is take Balaam to another hill with a different view of the Israelites and asks him to do a curse again. When that doesn't work, they move to another viewpoint and he tries again.

It makes me think of some people I know, they don't like being told "no", so if they ask you a question and you say "no" they ask it again worded slightly different.

"Can I have a bagel with cream cheese?"

"Sorry, we're out of cream cheese."

"What if I just had a bagel and you put some cream cheese on it?"

I wonder how often we do that with God. He doesn't respond right away of give us the response we want so instead we ask in another way. Maybe we even go to another church, God will give me the answer I want there.

Does it really change the answer...?

T

Monday, March 07, 2016

New Book "Twenty-First Century Parables"

Sorry, but today is shameless self-promotion.

Most people don't know it, but I have been working on a book for a few years retelling the parables of Jesus for a new audience. It's $0.99 and only available as an ebook. I hope you like it and share it with others! You can find it at:

iBooks

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

Kobo

Copia

Or just Google it, some of the results are funny...

T