Father Barry Foster, a priest in Dublin, Ireland, parked his car on a rather steep slope close to his church. His little cairn terrier was lying on the rear seat and could not be seen by anyone outside the vehicle. Father Foster got out of the car and turned to lock the door with his usual parting command to the dog. “Stay!” he ordered loudly, to an apparently empty car. “Stay!”
When I was in Junior High School in Dover, Ohio, a Billy Graham film came to town, and I got three free tickets from a Bible study class I attended at the public library across from the school. My mother wanted to go. She was the one in our family who took us to church and taught us about the faith.
The words of 2 Timothy 2:22-23 are both appropriate and challenging for our time.
“It’s for your own good.” Those words make me shudder. How about you? It takes me back to childhood.
Psalm 126 is one of the fifteen “Songs of Ascent,” including Psalms 120-134, that were sung by worshipers as they made the journey up to Jerusalem for the annual feasts.
About 2,700 years ago, the prophet Isaiah tried to bring hope to a people who had lost all hope. The Babylonians had exiled them from their homeland.
Years ago, some friends of mine were driving across Texas on I-20. Since it was around 2 am, there wasn’t much traffic. You know how it is at that time of the night. They were sort of groggy and everything seemed a little surreal.
Have you ever thought about how much journeying and traveling there is in the Bible?
Caroline Hwang wrote an article in Newsweek magazine a dozen years ago about her experience of being a child of immigrants who moved to this country two years before she was born. To ensure that she reaped all the advantages of this country, her parents saw to it that she became fully assimilated.
If you have ever felt somewhat inadequate in knowing how to pray, just know that you are in good company. The disciples felt that way and asked Jesus to teach them to pray. Paul wrote in Romans 8:26 that we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.”