“Was it mere chance that the early Christian writers spoke of Christ as Life with a capital “L” ?, asked E. Stanley Jones inhis book Abundant Living. As this NewYear begins, I want to affirm that capital “L” for myself and share this life of immense abundance which the early Christians so courageously lived and proclaimed. Peter, that disciple whom Jesus renamed “the rock”, wrote these words of wisdom for a new year’s beginning sometime around 64AD: “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”That was written to a people adrift and without purpose, not unlike so many today. I begin the New Year soberly assessing how I want to spend my remaining days, however many or few they may be. I lift up a Deo Gratis for the privilege I have in sharing the faith with my Sunday school class at Brown Memorial Church because it enforces a discipline to search the Scriptures.

          Of late, our lessons have concentrated on identifying who Jesus is (not was!).The incarnation lessons came alive for me as I listened to Elizabeth Elliot’s consideration of Mary’s humility at the announcement that her womb would become the chalice in which the Lord God Himself would become a man and begin human life as an embryo. The tiny fingers Mary touched were the very same fingers that created the unfathomable stars of the universe. A single star, Antares, in the constellation of Scorpio, is 390 times the size of the Sun. It can be seen low on the summer horizon. A fictional hollow rubber ball the size of Antares could contain within its sphere the Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Earth and the Moon, all rotating in their present orbits. In a splendid and laconic understatement, the creation account in Genesis 1:16 states simply, “He also made the stars.”Elizabeth Elliot quotes an old Scottish preacher: “Just think of the stars. They are the pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of space and time where light swims through a billion years from island universe to island universe in all their stellar magnitude.”