Archive for the ‘Faith’ Category

After opening the service in our small college chapel with the usual formalities, our guest speaker, an old man with a weathered face stepped to the podium. He wasn’t smiling as he began. “Most of us,” he said, “have moss growing on our butts.”

There was a collective, gasp from the conservative faculty and student body. I am certain the word “butt” had never been uttered within the walls of that little chapel. One of the deans rose halfway from his metal folding chair—then sat back down.

As we were driving to our beautiful mountain getaway in Colorado. My then three-year-old granddaughter, Jadyn, asked where our cabin was located.

I said, ” Our place is located right where those five lines come down the mountain and join at the bottom.” I pointed to the lines on the mountain which are actually the avalanche shoots you see in the accompanying picture.

“Can you see them?” She stared intently at the mountain for several minutes. Then the following conversation took place.

Last night I was captivated by two speakers at the Compassion International appreciation banquet.

Both men began their lives in hopeless social, spiritual, and physical poverty.  But they didn’t stay there.

People they had never met lived out  two principles that changed these boys lives and as a result, changed the lives of thousands of other children.

A 23 year old young woman and an elderly woman heard the stories of these boys and sponsored them.

The amazing result?

When I was speaking with Women of Faith, I listened as Nicole Johnson spoke about emotional explosive gases that had built up in her life. One day she couldn’t find a sock that she knew she had put in the dryer.

Suddenly there was an explosion of rage and frustration.  This was not “Sock Anger,” she explained.  The missing sock was  only the match that ignited the real anger that had been building for years.

Remember the old saying “The straw that broke the camels back?” It really wasn’t the straw broke his back.  It was the unbearable weight that accumulated before the straw was put in place. Have you ever exploded and wondered why?

Last week Americans watched in horror and some with fascination as two young men paralyzed a city of more than a million souls.  For days people huddled in their homes, mostly because authorities requested it as a strategy to smoke out the cowards who had planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, but many others huddled in fear.  

I am not a social scientist, but I have a theory.