• Join us for the Thanksgiving service this evening at 7:00. Be the one-in-ten who turns back to give thanks. Also, remember this coming Sunday is our JOINT SERVICE at 10:00a and, if you would, pass word along to anyone you may suspect is unaware. Thanks.
• In a mailer on behalf of persecuted Christians, I read recently of a South African family (mom, dad and two teenage kids) that went to Afghanistan as, in effect, medical missionaries. I believe they were there about two years before the father, son, and daughter were killed in their apartment by extremists. The mother was away from home at the time of the shootings and survived.
• Since reading the article, I’ve thought several times of what might have been going round in the heads of two teenagers as they left home for such a potentially dangerous place. In the article, the mother explained that they were pretty ordinary churchgoers until they began to feel an increasingly powerful sense of calling. Of course, plenty of teenagers have a sharp sense of their parents hypocrisy. They see the difference between Jesus’ words and the way we, as we get older, are resigned to living our lives. I’ve wondered if both kids didn’t think — “finally, we’re going to take all this stuff seriously.”
• I’ve said in the past that most of American Christianity is inoculation: we give our kids just enough of the faith to make sure they don’t get the real thing. They naturally despise the lukewarmness — as Jesus taught them to despise it. Jesus said, “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (L 9:24). In America, unlike thousands of other places and periods over the last two millennia, we’ve not had to take those words literally.
• The power in this is that such ordinary people were able to do something so extraordinary. It has to change what we think of as possible. Let the world give itself to the pursuit of happiness. Our business is to ask God how we might lose our lives.
– Pastor Eric