Blog

Some people love surprises. I’m not one of them. When I’m going to get a snack and I ask Diane if she wants anything, sometimes she’ll say, “Surprise me.” I don’t say that. It’s not that I’m never surprised. I’m surprised quite often. I think I know how things are going to be and then they go another direction and I’m surprised. I like predictable better than surprises but that doesn’t mean my life is predictable.

That’s the title of a book by J.B. Phillips. In the introduction he wrote, “Many men and women are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, “godless,” but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to “account for” life.

It’s a one-word prayer in the Hebrew, we translate it with two words, “Remember me.” It is prayed by Job, Samson, Hannah, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, a Psalmist and perhaps most famously, by the thief on the cross.

Usually when we think of drunkenness we think of the overuse of alcohol. Paul wrote that we should not “be drunk with wine,” rather we should be filled with the Spirit. There are other ways to be drunk. Some people are drunk in their thinking, in other words, they are not “sober-minded.” There are many people that have never been drunk with alcohol that have crazy thinking. When we are not thinking Biblically, we are not sober-minded.

Samuel. The Ark. Saul. David and Goliath. Jonathan. Ziklag. If you had the privilege of attending Sunday School as a child, you probably heard stories about people, places and events from David’s life. These are stories that matter! Not only because they are part of a much bigger story but because the lives of the individuals mentioned in those stories matter. As I often say, “The trouble is in the ditches.”