It Is All Training

When I became a father for the first time I suddenly realized I was completely responsible for another human being.  I wrote my dad a letter and asked him for advise on how to discipline.  I wrote the letter with the intention of learning how to punish my child when they had misbehaved.   What my dad wrote back is perhaps the best parenting advise I ever received.  He said that discipline meant to teach.  At that moment I had to decide, did I want to teach my children or punish them?  Teaching is much harder because it requires training.  It seems to me that most of life is training regiments designed by God to teach us.

Watching The Big Bang

I regularly sit in front of a roaring kiln in the dark early morning hours.  I love this about my falls; it is always the same, cold mornings, clothes half buttoned and hat over pillow hair I stumble forth in the cold dark to stoke up the kiln.  I sit beside its warmth and rumble drinking hot coffee and reading with God.  There is sacredness to this, God, fire, air, dirt.  Inside that kiln fire is forcibly redistributing matter from one form to another, a cosmic big bang caged in a steel box in front of me.  Oxides and dirt are melting and mixing with carbon and creating colors that painters couldn’t imagine.  These are some of the most sincere times on earth, times brought to us by God, Maker of fire, air and dirt.   

Where Have We Driven Our Peg?

"In that day," declares the LORD of hosts, "the peg driven in a firm place will give way; it will even break off and fall, and the load hanging on it will be cut off, for the LORD has spoken."  Isaiah 22:25

Election day is always a good day to ask yourself, "Where have I driven my peg?"

Spared

It is difficult to read parts of the Old Testament and see how drastically God deals with people who sin.  Sin must be much more horrible than we have made it out to be.  We live lives of pampered appeasement to sin with seemingly little or no consequences, at least none that match the penalties of the Old Testament.  We all live safely under the sacrifice of Christ and His payment of our penalty.  However when viewed in context of the Old Testament our lives must reflect a greater sense of gratefulness and adoration for a Savior who would spare us from such horrific consequences of our sinful actions.   

Entering the Sacred Vault

No one has seen a beautiful fall full of color and not admired the beauty of it.  There is no accounting for every common bush and tall tree to simultaneously begin to produce color that no human artist could ever match.  It is one thing to apply color to a canvas but all together different to become color.  There is something very Holy about fall’s colors and that is how extravagantly wasteful it is.  These beautiful colors are swept away on this mornings wind to pile with the others and fade to brown and then to earth matter.  In 4.5 billion years man could not make a single scarlet fall leaf and yet Someone toss them about like a gentle rain of pure gold declaring Sacredness abounds for those with eyes to see.