Never Let Go
Meg and I went through a brief phase where we were enamored of Ikea. If you’ve never been, it’s an enormous store filled with all manner of housewares and furniture. When you enter, you’re supposed to go up the escalator and wind your way through the upstairs and then the downstairs, finding what you came to buy along the way; resisting or not resisting a thousand impulse buys along the way. Then at the end are Swedish meatballs. Well, a little café that sells them because it is a Swedish company.
It's a dazzling piece of capitalism.
Their furniture is inexpensive in part because they’ve outsourced the assembly part to you. We once crammed a sofa and loveseat into the back of our minivan, and still had room to bring the kids home, too.
Read More
Jesus Calling
As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake-for they were fishermen. And, He said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As He went from there, He saw two other brothers, James, son of Zebedee and his brother, John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed Him. Matthew 4:18-22
We just heard Jesus calling Peter, Andrew, James and John. He was calling them from something that they were very familiar with. He was calling them away from what had been the only life they knew and what appeared to be their life. They dropped everything and followed Him. My, what faith! Guts? All we know from scripture is that they were fishermen, living day after day in their profession. It doesn’t tell us if they had a passion for anything different than the only thing they knew, fishing.
What we do know is that Jesus had a plan for them.
Read More
He did it.
John Templeton was from the small town of Winchester, Tennessee, the son of a poor cotton farmer. He went to Yale, graduated near the top of his class in 1934, became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and eventually the founder of the Templeton Growth Fund. He was a brilliant man, extremely successful and a generous philanthropist. Despite becoming a billionaire, he lived frugally and lived quietly in a fairly modest home in the Bahamas.
He also had a keen interest in reconciling science and faith in the pursuit of ultimate truth, and collected books on the subject. He wanted that work to continue, so he built a library outside of Sewanee, Tennessee, where his books would go after he died, with apartments where scholars could come and study. It was completed in 2000, the year that our family arrived at Sewanee, where I went to seminary.
Read More
