Hebrews 11:1-3 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Do you remember Leonid Brezhnev? He was a Soviet statesman and Communist Party official who became the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964-1982. Brezhnev’s rule was during the height of much of the Cold War. It was also during a time when the Soviet Union persecuted individuals of all faiths and officially endorsed the path of atheism. When he died in 1982 world leaders flew into Moscow for his funeral. One of those leade
John 14:1-6 14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in Go; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 1 John 1:5-7 GNB “Now the message that we have heard from his Son and announce is this: God is light, and there is no da
During my adolescence I accidently came across a storyteller on the radio on Saturday night. I loved the sound of his voice, his stories and the old-fashioned radio show that surrounded it. I was sort of mesmerized. It took a while because there was no Google but finally, I discovered who it was and what the show was called. The storyteller was Garrison Keillor and he hosted “A Prairie Home Companion” every week on Saturday evenings on NPR. During the show he would tell a story from his fictitious hometown of Lake Wobegon Minnesota. This was a place where “all the women were strong, all the men were good looking, and all the women were above average.” As it turns out I was not alone in my en
Christian speaker and writer Ron Hutchcraft tells the story of an art gallery that ran a competition for painters, offering a prize for the best painting on the subject of peace. The prize-winner was a real surprise: It showed the ocean in a violent storm, with lightning in the sky and waves crashing into cliffs by the shore. So where was the peace? You had to look carefully. Halfway up the cliff was a bird’s nest tucked into a hollow in the rock, and there a mother bird was sitting on the nest with her little babies safely underneath her. That was peace — not the absence of a storm, but safety in the middle of the storm. This week I feel as if I have been in a storm. Starting school both in