I  can remember when my oldest son first discovered that turning on a switch in the wall made lights turn on in the ceiling.  He was fascinated by this concept.  Confused and amazed all at once.  After all, there was no visible connection between the two apparatus.  How could a small switch on the wall have such a large affect of the overall look of the whole room?  It was amazing, perplexing, fascinating and wonderful all at the same time.  Anita and I spent a lot of time getting after him for wanting to turn lights on and off, on and off, on and off.  

            We all know that it is electricity that runs through wires that makes all this work, but even that is a mysterious process.  We have seen it so many times that we take it for granted that it works.  We can’t really see what is going on, but we fully trust that when we turn on the switch the lights will come on.

            Yet how many of you have had trouble trusting in God for reasons that are very similar to the reasons that we would have for not trusting electricity.  We cannot see the electrons flowing through the wires (often we cannot even see the wires) just like we cannot see God.  Most of us do not completely understand how everything works in an electrical circuit and God tends to be very mysterious to us.  We cannot understand how he does things a lot of times, and the things he asks us to do seem to make no sense.  Yet somehow it is harder for me to trust God than it is for me to trust electrical lighting. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anybody here ever struggle with having enough time? I find that time and money are very similar. You can spend time and you and spend money and you can only spend each of them once. However, you can earn more money, but you can never earn more time. We must be very wise about how we spend our time, because it won’t have another opportunity to spend the time we’ve been given. During Christmas, everything concerning time gets amplified and we become doubly busy, and when that happens, we can miss the true reason for Christmas.

  Read the rest of this entry »

When I was growing up in my family, it seems like we always had a goal that we were shooting for at the end of Christmas, and the goal was to be able to say, “This was the best Christmas we’ve ever had.” Did any of you grow up in a family where you kind of felt pressured to have the best Christmas ever? We didn’t have real clear criteria for what would make a Christmas the best Christmas ever, but the goal was there nonetheless.

  Read the rest of this entry »