Hope

The Gravity of it all

Earth and North America from Space

For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. John 3:17

I recently went to see the movie Gravity and I loved it. The views of Earth from space were stunning and they almost moved me to tears. Only two actors were used during the entire movie and it not only held my interest, it captivated me. Parts of it took my breath away, literally. I found myself wanting to take big gulps of air, especially for Sandra Bullock who was dynamic.

Watching this movie, watching our Earth from space made me see us how God must see us. I felt for us, I did. All of us with our piles of idols……our pack of worries and heartaches, our problems that seem so hugely monumental. Well, they are to us, anyway.

And I guess they are to God too, because He saw our plight. He saw our great need for a Savior, even when we didn’t see it ourselves.

And all these things that seem so big to us, so unsolvable, so wondrous, so lasting, are less than a breath to God.

I saw us as He does, as a people and a planet worth saving.

And none of the things we are so worried about right now today will matter in 20 years. They may not even matter next week.

Thank you God, for sending us a rescuer. A redeemer. Help us to know that even if we have no idea how we are going to solve our problems today, that somehow we will be okay.

Because you are here. And you promised never to leave or forsake us no matter what.

this photo is a digitally enhanced negative taken from 1972 Apollo 16 by Royce Bair/IronRodArt, some rights reserved

God and the Brandenburg Concerto

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This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope…….It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. Lamentations 3:21-26

Ever feel like the ground has suddenly shifted beneath your feet?

Like a great seismic shift happened somewhere and everyone got the memo but you and you feel like you’re free-falling through your own life?

Trying to walk backwards on a moving sidewalk?

You feel attacked by the “never wills…..” All of a sudden you know that some things in this life “never will” happen again……the train left and took your youth with it.

One minute you had your feet firmly planted on those sands of time and while you weren’t looking the tide came and took it out from under your feet and swept most of it out to sea.

Don’t be alarmed. This is a normal part of being human. Of living in an ever-changing culture, a time-stamped world.

When I feel that out of control falling feeling……..the one thing that helps me the most is to be reminded that God will never, ever change. When God is your anchor, you don’t have to be devastated by things that change in this life. And when He says, “I got this.” You know He really really really does.

This morning the Brandenburg Concerto came on the classical station I listen to on the way to work. I remembered a time when my Mom and I were much younger and I used to listen to this in my old room when the leaves rained yellow in the fall. She used to tell me it made her nervous, and she called it the “nervous music.” It was a sweet memory and I was smiling yet I wanted to cry too.

It comforted me to know that God and the Brandenburg concerto will never change, even if everything else does. And wouldn’t you know that God worked it out that the last note played as I coasted to a stop in the parking lot.

The best way we can honor today is by being fully present in the moment God gives us and by cherishing the people in our lives right now, we shape our memories tomorrow. We can tell time who’s boss because we don’t have to regret it when it’s gone.

 

When the Son sets in our hearts

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“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.” James 4:1,2

“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.” Jeremiah 17:9,10

For the first time this morning I was able to pray minus the sound of gunfire from the dove hunters out in the desert. It has disrupted my morning peace for two days now. My brother and I were both complaining about it on opening day which was September first. He’d gone out to his driveway with his mug of coffee as he usually does when he is home and was looking forward to listening to his doves cooing from the trees in his yard. Now he is worried about the wild turkeys they have all enjoyed watching come through in the evenings.

We both decided we would put out some wild feed to keep a few close.

The staccato sound of the guns made me think of what is going on half a world away, in Syria. They say around 2 million Syrian people are now refugees and around half of these are women and children. Unrest is the state of the world today.

All my life, I have sat in church hearing of a time when there will be “wars and rumors of wars.” It was just a Bible verse and a time somewhere in the future, but real war was never anything that touched me. It was never something that surprised me or factored into my life in any way at all. It was just a part of what I heard in church or on TV.

But how many people around the world today must live, pray and sleep to the sound of gunfire and shelling? Living and breathing with fear and the possible loss of their own life or the life of their children. Knowing that any moment, they will lose what little shelter they have, grabbing what little they own and heading across the border to somewhere else.

Our world is getting crazier every day. There is no doubt we are in the last days, but who knows how long these last days will stretch out?

There is only one thing that will ever stop war for good and the truth is, not one of us is willing to do what it takes to stop it. Until we each settle the war in our own hearts, war will never end. The war in our hearts will only end when we invite Jesus in.

And I am not talking about lip service but life change. There is a tired, old argument that people use over and over. In fact, I heard it again on the radio just Sunday morning. A talk show host said: “I hate religion because more wars have been caused by religion than anything else.” And while I can understand why they make that claim, it’s still as wrong as wrong can be.

Guns don’t kill people and religion doesn’t cause wars. All wars start as a result of the evil in the confines of the human heart, and just because something is done in God’s name, doesn’t mean God is in favor of it.

When someone is truly transformed by the love of Christ, it will show by how eager they are to strive for peace, not war.

I am talking about a relationship here, not a religion. That’s what makes Christianity different from any other on the face of the earth. And when He comes in and makes a home in our hearts, peace reigns. Note that I didn’t say perfection, I said peace.

War is caused by the selfish desire to get what we want when we want it. Nothing more. And when power and money are added in to the mix it just gets bigger because more is at stake. Sometimes war is unavoidable. When the end result means peace for the world, then I believe it is just.

Universally though, the hope of this world, more than ever, is Jesus. Jesus, only and ever Jesus.

You might wonder why then, does Jesus say this?

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

In light of all the talk about peace, it doesn’t seem to make any sense, until you understand that while a relationship with Jesus most certainly brings peace to the individual heart and life, it doesn’t necessarily bring peace to the world. That’s because of one simple aspect of human nature.

We still want our way, not His way. When Jesus said that, it was with perfect understanding that He knows what we are made of.

When Jesus was born, King Herod was so threatened by the rumor of a new King, he had all Jewish babies living in Egypt two years and under slaughtered. And right before He was crucified, the religious leaders of the day were so threatened by Jesus popularity with the people, and by their loss of power, security and position, they had to put together a mock trial complete with false testimony in order to sentence Him to death.

And yet, He reaches for us still.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. John 3:16-19

I pray for our world today. I pray it finds Jesus. You might think that it looks pretty bleak and that there is really nothing we can do as an individual. But there is always something we can do. We can all shine the light of truth and love brightly, each in our own corner.

Right where we are. And pray.

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. James 5:16

See Me

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A letter to our youth obsessed culture:

See me not as a “Senior” but as a person.

Don’t cast me aside as if I no longer have any value. Don’t look at me as having passed my expiration date. People don’t have those. There is life, and there is death, and while I have breath, I still have life. I still have opinions. I stll have feelings. 

If you are a health care worker and you are looking after me? When I tell you I have to use the bathroom, don’t tell me when you can get to it. Can you imagine just for a moment how you would feel if you had to ask another person to help you do that? One of our most basic of human functions? Think of me the next time you are rushing to the bathroom when you think you can’t hold it anymore. I have been through a lot in my life, and I don’t deserve that.

Don’t see just my wrinkled skin, watery eyes, see the value of all my years added up.

There is much I can still teach you. Much you still have to learn.

I know it makes you uncomfortable to see me because I am a reminder that you too will be here someday. You will see the rights you once had slowly dwindling away and your friends and loved ones die one by one. You will remember your youth and how you felt, who you loved and how they loved you.

You will remember smooth glowing skin and strong legs that never got tired.

See me. See me with your heart and you will see the value of my soul which is priceless to God.

See that all of us equal here.

Because I have laced my days together with Gratitude, with a big “G” I can be at peace even here. I may look alone to you, but I’m not. I have the best company you can imagine because He dwells with me. Here.

Here in my sunny chair, in my little room, I take comfort in the God who saw me in my Mother’s womb. He sees me the way I was then, a newly born soul.

Soon, very soon I will be born once more and this time forever.

See me.

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.

Psalm 139:13-18

photo: flickr by Nutch Bicer, some rights reserved

To the Atheist Pinner

Confession

I awoke this morning with a prayer on my lips. Not so much a prayer than a bunch of whispers strung together in the dark. It all started yesterday with the story about the man who was taking a morning jog in the town where his girlfriend lived. Three teenage youths were sitting on a porch and one of them said, “Hey there’s our target.” And then pulled out a gun and shot Christopher Lane in the back. All because, “They were bored.”

This kind of thing is happening more and more. All these events prompt us to ask just what kind of world are we living in? What makes three teenaged youths feel like life is so bleak that they have to manufacture a murder for excitement? What brought them to such hopelessness? I see it in their eyes in the mug shots. It is so easy to hate them, their insolence. But I want to know what got them there?

There were other questions that I spoke into the half-light this morning as well. Questions like why is my own church closing down to put in new carpet and a coffee shop when I know for a fact that children are going to school hungry a few short miles away. I am having a hard time reconciling that. I am still praying about that one.

Another thought came through…….and this one was loud and clear. What am I doing with my days? How will they measure up when I am standing before God and He asks why I didn’t give a reason for the hope within me?

Then on Pinterest I ran across a pin that said “Pinned to Atheism” below it, and I had to follow the thread. Nothing I saw surprised me much, and saddened me more than anything. There was one comparing prayer to something I can’t even name here, with a picture. And there were all the references to our Old Testament God who is portrayed as a cruel old man in the sky who takes pleasure in striking people dead.

If I could talk with you, this is what I would tell you. I can identify with some of what you posted, I really can. That is, I could if I didn’t know God the way I do. And honestly, sometimes I think if we had done a better job at loving in the church it would take the sting out of your hate.

But then again, Jesus loved perfectly and they killed Him for it.

And I understand your difficulty in seeing how a loving God could ask Abraham to kill his only son. If I didn’t know the context and the whole story, and if I hadn’t personally experienced the depth and breadth and love of God for myself.

You see, Abraham had a faith and grasp of the love of God that we can scarcely understand. And Abraham had a promise in his pocket. A promise that he would be the father of a great nation. He knew that could never happen if Issac died. He also knew that God loved Issac even more than Abraham did. He trusted God with what he loved most in the world.

And God will never ask anyone to love more than He already has.

You ask, “What kind of God would do that?”

The kind of God who would love so much He would lose what He loved most to get back a people who were willfully turned against Him.

The kind of God who didn’t hesitate to volunteer Himself up for a terrible death for a people who for the most part were uncaring and disinterested.

I wish you knew Him. I wish the church did a better job at loving so you wouldn’t have so many easy targets. I did notice that none of your boards targeted Jesus. It is tough to find fault with someone who spent their entire time on earth going about doing good. If we all did a better job at following His example, I have a feeling it would diffuse some of the anger I saw on your boards.

I did notice that one of them said something like, “I don’t need a God to tell me right from wrong, I have a conscience.”

But where did that come from? Why do we instinctively know that some things are just plain wrong and nobody argues about it. We know things like murder and stealing are wrong. C.S Lewis did a masterful job at explaining that one.

As I rounded the corner on my morning walk, I saw the fingers of light come down out of the sky and I thought about the source of that light as the strains of “You Never Let Go” came through my iPod. I felt something that I feel every single day when I see that and I never ever take it for granted. The thought dropped in like a pin: “We love because He first loved us.”

I can’t imagine not knowing the source of that light. I can’t imagine how hopeless it would be to believe in nothing bigger than your own thoughts, nothing bigger than yourself and what your eyes can see around you.

I want so much for you to know my God. And if you were here I would tell you about all the things I have seen and heard and felt that cannot be explained any other way but Supernaturally. I would tell you of lives changed in the twinkling of an eye. I would tell you of the healing I received and how I will never forget it, and I would tell you how He came to me one cold and foggy December day and touched me with a love that I can never quite put into words.

I would tell you of the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love. A love I know to be real.

And how He loves you so, even if you don’t believe in Him.

When you’re nursing a hurt

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You’re walking around in your day minding your own business. Maybe it’s even a good day and you have had some things happen that can only be described as a “God touching you on the shoulder” moment. Something happened that you just know was God arranged.

Basking in the glow of that light you can almost still feel warming your shoulders,  you are blindsided by something you never saw coming. Oh how it hurts, I know, I have been there. I have asked the questions right along with you:

Why me, why this, why now? And in the silence, the hurt you find yourself in the middle of searches for a safe place to go.

It feels like you have been through enough already. Didn’t all those tears you cried in the dark of night, didn’t those add up to something? David’s couch swam with tears too, even he wasn’t exempt, but somehow that doesn’t make right now any better.

When the wound is raw, it is tempting to ignore that good thing that happened in the wake of the pain that threatens to swallow it up. You’re not sure whether to sit in a corner and lick your wounds, or pour it out to anyone who will listen. And though it’s tempting to dump out hurtful words to the one who hurt you, don’t do it.

Because wounding them doesn’t take your own away, it only multiplies your own pain.

But don’t you hear me God?  I’m your child. The injustice of it all. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, but it happened. And now?

There is something you need to do. You need to let Him be your justice. He can’t work on anyone else’s heart unless you release yours. You be amazed what happens once you do this. Our God is so big and generous that He not only wants to heal you, He wants to heal that other person too.

And when the Bible says that He binds up the brokenhearted? Friend, that is for right now, not some vague time in the hereafter, it is here…..now…….as well as after.

Who doesn’t have pain? Who doesn’t have sorrow. This is a universal fact. What follows that there can only be a universal answer:

It’s found in the person of Jesus. He is the only one who can actually do something about it. In fact, He already did. That dead old thing was wadded up, crumpled in a ball and tossed into the fire long ago.

This is what we can know as believers. He can meet that ache right this moment by the power of the Holy Spirit who is your comforter. Right now……He can reach in and put His hand into your heart where it stings the most. Don’t doubt that He sees you.

He sees your every effort to focus on the positive, to keep moving forward even when it hurts. And He will reward it.

He had to do that once, you know.  And with you in mind, He did it.

He could never forget you. You are in His thoughts day and night.

And there’s nothing that happens to you or to me that’s too big for Him to handle. That is the hope I hold out to you today. The world needs love, but more than love it needs hope.

Never need an appointment to meet with Jesus

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What do you do when you find yourself at a crossroads? You go to the cross.

It’s so tempting to try to figure everything out with our minds, but what about when you feel you can’t trust your mind? Try as we might, there are times when we can’t take it apart and put it all back together in any kind of order. And when the heart and emotions get involved we might as well throw anything rational out the window.

When the heart gets involved, thought and logic whirl around inside your head and beat the sides of your brain like a tennis shoe in a spin dryer until nothing is clear.

When I entered prayer this past Tuesday, I took no hope of feeling better, no expectation of much of anything.  It was simply all I knew how to do. There are times you enter prayer that way.

I got a call from Mom on Monday evening. My Dad was on his way to the ER for irregular heartbeat. My Mom sounded okay, but I could hear the panic undertow in her voice. She said he hadn’t felt good for a couple of days. They ran some tests and released him, and he was back in his own bed by 2:30 Tuesday morning.

I thought of that old Lewis Grizzard line: “Elvis is dead and I don’t feel so good myself.” Now, my Mom, my Dad and my brother are all on medication for heart issues. And I don’t feel so good myself. Actually, I feel fine, but the stress of all this might kill me.

I want to swoop down and fix it all for them. I want to go take over and do what they can’t.

When it’s hard for me to open a jar, I feel bad because if it is hard for me, how much harder for my Mom? It’s little things like that I think of. I toss and turn in the night and wonder when the next call will come. First, Dad’s eyes and now his heart. I realize I am going through a kind of grief. A grief of knowing someday they really won’t be here.

So Tuesday morning I really needed my prayer time. I even lit three candles instead of one. I needed Father Son and Holy Ghost all hands on deck prayer.

And kneeling there by my chair in the silence, I felt the weight of importance in each and every moment we have here on earth. This life is but a breath, a vapor. A little while and then we are gone……

Eternity stretches before us like a shimmering cord that reaches to Heaven and it’s tethered to the cross. I know if I cling to Jesus, somehow I can always find my way back home. I just have to trust Him with this little speck of time that is my life.

No matter what the heartache. No matter how bleak the future might have looked 30 minutes ago, I now find that a few moments at the foot of a blood soaked cross, a light switch has been thrown. All of a sudden, just for this moment my future is as bright as the noonday sun. And that one moment is enough.

And oh what relief it is to find at times when the soul has been swept bare and black as night that Jesus has not left, that He’s there holding out a candle to light my way.

I long for the times before vandals, when the churches were open and the light was always on and the pastor or priest was always “In.” I long for the little country parish when the minister made house calls and offered a cup of tea. When you could just show up without an appointment.

I may not have Father Tim, but I have Jesus.

And He is always “In”

The bridge between Heaven and earth

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The sky splashed a brilliant pink and KBAQ was playing a Bach concerto as I rolled to a stop between the white lines in the parking lot at 5:30. The scene in the sky turned my thoughts toward Heaven and I thought of the conversation my Mom and I had when I was back home just recently.

We were scanning the obits, and she was lamenting the latest passing of one of her friends. That got us to talking about people who have passed on, and her Dad, my Grandpa. I told her that he is one of the first people I want to meet in Heaven. Besides Jesus.

He held me in his arms and called me his blond angel in German. I wonder if he was thinking of his little Annie who was only about four when she died. He had left the shotgun out and a foster child who was staying with them shot her dead. He ran away after that and they never found him, though they searched. My Grandmother had to watch her little girl die and my Grandpa had to live with that guilt all his life.

I love him, though I never knew him. He went to see Annie when he was in his sixties after a battle with stomach cancer. Shortly before he died, he said the only thing he wanted to do one more time was see Yosemite. Each year he drove the family there, he watching everything but the road and my Grandmother, terrified of going over the cliff would promptly put herself to sleep in the passenger seat.

My Mom says that when she and my Aunt reached their teens they were secretly mortified because they knew as soon as they set up camp he would be over introducing himself and Jesus to the neighbors. He had no problem sharing His faith. He wanted others to know the reason for his hope and the joy of the Savior.

I wish I could be more like him.

Shortly before my sister-in-law died, also of cancer, she said she saw my Grandfather and that they talked of roses. He told her he liked white ones. I don’t doubt what she said. I believe people close to death see many different things on that fringe of eternity.

This being a blog centered around Christian belief and thought, I guess from time to time I feel a need to explain in a simple way what we actually believe and why for those who may not know.

The thing that makes the Christian faith different from any other religion on earth is that we have a living Savior. It’s God reaching down to us, not us reaching up to Him. It’s Him making the first move.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8

God gives us a future and a hope. We never have to worry about death as long as we know Jesus. He only asks us to do one thing, to acknowledge that we can’t save ourselves. That whatever we’ve done on our own is not good enough. God expects perfection, and the only perfect person who ever lived was Jesus.

With three little words, the doorway to Heaven was blown open:

“It is finished.”

Everyone has to die once, then face the consequences. Christ’s death was also a one-time event, but it was a sacrifice that took care of sins forever. And so, when he next appears, the outcome for those eager to greet him is, precisely, salvation. Hebrews 9:27,28 The Message

I don’t know about you, but I am not doing this life again. I am going to meet my Grandpa.

God’s love reaches what you can’t fix

Convicted

I fretted, I worried, I prayed. Then I asked others to pray. Then I flew back with a speech all prepared in my heart, hoping God would hollow out the perfect time. You know, how you wish it would work. At just the right time, the clouds part and the sun would beam down upon my heart and before me on the wall would be brandished the words:

Now is the time.

Maybe it happened and maybe I missed it. But God taught me something anyway. You can’t fix everything or even anything but you can always love. Things happen, life gets in the way, sometimes people get sick or they’re not emotionally available. Or maybe you aren’t. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t in it. Love is still present. God is still working behind the scenes. He is just that big.  And maybe sometimes just loving and being there is all God wants us to do. Maybe it’s the most important thing any of us can do.

Love is patient, love is kind. But sometimes it hurts like hell. 

In the Doctor’s office with my Dad, I gave just as big a sigh of relief as he did when he learned that he had a reprieve from a shot in his eye. It seems the treatments are doing what they are supposed to so it was a good appointment. I was thankful I could be there.

Tyler, the dog everyone shares is getting older too. He has his playful moments and his bark is fearsome if you don’t know him, but he no longer hops into the car. His hips are stiff and he hesitates at the door. He’s my walking buddy in the mornings at my brother’s house. He still bounds ahead of me, and if I cross the street to the orchard, he waits at the end of the driveway faithfully until I get back.

One morning my Mom opened the paper and found that another friend and school-mate had died. That led to talking of others who had gone on before. In your eighties Heaven must seem close. We talked of who we wanted to see there first, besides Jesus of course.

And always, time to leave presses up against the present.

The day before I left, a little girl was already worried about when “Nori goes home.” She is ten but she still struggles with “L’s.” And when we left her at school, we didn’t mention it. They dealt with the emotion when they picked her up at school. Separation anxiety.

I think we all have it.

Deep down, we know we’ve all been separated from our forever home, the one we were meant to have. We know something is not quite right. And we spend all our lives trying to get back there.

Thank you Jesus, for being that one way.

No more goodbyes ever again. And though it takes the sting out of the goodbyes here and now, I still felt it as I looked back once more through tears as they drove off dabbing their own eyes.

In all of our comings and goings, and behind the hope and dream of every trip home and every trip back, He remains.  And more importantly, He is big enough to fix what I never could anyway.

Prayer this morning: “Lord I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Amen

Prayer for a missing child

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AMBER Alert (missing child) for Arizona
Currently active
Posted 5 minutes ago
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Javidson Mosley (21 months-old)

Last seen Jul 11, 2013 in Tempe, AZ

Vehicle:
1994 Lexus, Maroon, 4 door
Arizona license plate #BCD4654

It came in last night just before we got off work and I was thinking of that again as I left the house this morning. I have said before, I can’t imagine anything worse than knowing your child was out there somewhere in danger. I don’t know how you would focus, act normal, go to work, do anything of any value while they were still out there.

And yet, people go through this reality everyday. They have to get up, go through the motions and in cases where they have more children, they have to look after them, do for them. All the while, thinking of that missing one.

As I left the house I patted Briggs who was sitting on his cat condo, very content after his morning meal. I am always careful about leaving in the dark. They never dart out, but just the same I like to know where they are before I go out that door. I think about the good feeling that gives me, that they are fed, safe, cared for.

Magnify that a gazillion times for kids. And yet, I see them every day in the store, Mom or Dad two aisles over maybe not even wondering where they are. I know, it happens. You get distracted by the others. But it only takes about 30 seconds and the wrong person at the right time.

I wish these parents knew the treasure they had. Little eternal souls they are responsible for. I see parents pick their kids up by jerking them up by the arm and it makes me crazy. Hold them.

Every kid deserves to have loving arms wrapped around them.

I feel for parents today. It’s not an easy world to raise kids in. The world has changed since I was growing up in the sixties. You can argue with me if you want, but I know. I was there. We rode our bikes and walked all over town. My brother and I rode our bikes to school or walked from the time we were in first grade. Other adults looked out for us when our parents weren’t there.

Teachers, principals, crossing guards, and bus drivers were allowed to give hugs. Not any more.

Rules layed down because of sick and twisted people. The new law of our land is fear, not freedom and it makes me sad.

But one thing I know to be true. God knows where that missing child is even if you don’t. Your prayers can reach them and I know another thing. God is always near to the broken-hearted. He will never turn away from a cry for help.

I know, bad things happen everyday. And everyday for the 10 happy endings, there are 20 unhappy ones.

And God is crying too. And there is no sorrow too big for Him to soothe. He lost a boy too once. He knows.

The Bible says that this world will get worse before it gets better. But don’t believe me, look around for yourself. But that doesn’t mean we have to be helpless. That doesn’t mean the fear has to win. Sometimes there comes a time we have to stand together to beat it back.

Darkness always shrinks back from the Light. That’s a law that God put in place and it rules the universe.

That is one thing that will never change.

Lord, I pray today for those whose children are missing. I pray for little Javidson Moseley and whomever is left behind, searching frantically. I pray for all the officers involved, and for a happy resolution. I pray for the grieving and paralyzed heart, the one who is feeling so much pain right now that it hurts to put one foot in front of the other. I pray for anger and thoughts of revenge to be held back and for clear thoughts. Hold them in Your hands today Lord, give them comfort today. Amen.

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Walt Stoneburner