Just finished an evening prayer with my two roommates. I arrived several hours late for Zack's birthday dinner. Jacob, Erica, and I spent the afternoon in Seattle visiting the Orion Center (a multifaceted center for homeless youth). Please pray for my visit with the Homeless Liaison for the Central Kitsap school district tomorrow.
Here are a few excerpts from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin:
"This, indeed, was home, --home--a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in his providence began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward."
"It is strange, then, that some tears fall on the pages of his Bible, as he lays it on the cotton-bale, and, with patient finger, threading his slow way from word to word, traces out its promises? Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot injure,--nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed separately, that the mind may take in their priceless value. Let us follow him a moment, as, pointing to each word, and pronouncing each half aloud, he reads,
'let--not--your--heart--be--troubled. In--my--Father's--house--are--many--mansions--. I--go--to--prepare--a--place--for--you.'
Cicero, when he buried his darling and only daughter, had a heart as full of honest grief as poor Tom's,--perhaps no fuller, for both were only men;--but Cicero could pause over no such sublime words of hope, and look to no such future reunion; and if he had seen them, ten to one he would not have believed,--he must fill his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation. But, to poor Tom, there it lay, just what he needed, so evidently true and divine that the possibility of a question never entered his simple head. It must be true; for, if not true, how could he live?
His Bible was thus marked through, from one end to the other, with a variety of styles and designations; so he could in a moment seize upon his favorite passages, without the labor of spelling out what lay between them;--and while it lay there before him, every passage breathing of some old home scene, and recalling some past enjoyment, his Bible seemed to him all of this life that remained, as well as the promise of a future one."
In speaking of the future one, please remember this Sunday in prayer as I preach on the last 2/3 of 1 Corinthians 15. "I tell you a mystery we will not all sleep, BUT we will all be changed." It is a sure things: we will be changed. Can we be ready? I am more stumped on how to preach this passage than I have been in a long while. Paul's first concern was that most live as thought there is no resurrection. Don't we act the same? I have said and heard, "O I long for heaven," while in reality there is little evidence that we believe in the forevermore. What would change if we lived with surety?
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