Measuring My Days

January 2007
Home Christmas, 2009 November 2009 October 2009 Blank page September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 Ad Dei Gloria February 2009 January 2009 Christmas 2008 A Christmas Story November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 The Coming of Jesus Christmas 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 Keepers July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 What Matters April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 Book Reviews Journals Favorite Links Contact Blank page

I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God.  Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy.          

                                      Anne Frank

 

          The Way, then, is written in our nerves, our blood, our tissues, in the total organization of life…The Christian Way is written not merely in the texts of Scripture but in the texture of life.  It is the way we are made to live….No mere event outside of us, however great, can take the place of an indwelling God, the Holy Spirit within us.  Only an Indwelling can rid us of indwelling fears….Nothing holds you unless it holds you from within –there must be Life…  Divine Life working as dynamic in the depths of us.  There must be Withinness of authority and withinness of power….And if we are possessed of the Holy Spirit, we will be made like Him. 

                                      E. Stanley Jones, The Way to Power & Poise

          I begin this New Year with a resolve to improve my sense of wonder… gaining fresh insights into that awesome Intelligence that governs our universe.  At Christmas, I watched photographs on a computer screen of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes soaring over my brother’s place in Kentucky.  Captured, too, were the distant and thrilling wild honks of their signals to one another as the photos revealed their looping circular flight as they corrected their southeastern path to their wintering place in Florida.  Come springtime, that same inbred Intelli-gence will guide them northwestward to their native Canadian summer home as the migration cycle is completed.  The beautiful documentary Wild Migration informed us of similar bird migrations taking place annually in all parts of the world.  Ergo, we know from experience that similar cycles govern monarch butterflies, zebra migrations in East Africa, the life cycles of plants, ebb and flow of ocean tides, and revolution of planets in space…all precisely on schedule according to some marvelous atomic clock.  Blessed am I and all who know intuitively that all of this did not and does not happen by chance.

        

Likewise, with thanks to cousin Dottie, I watched with riveting interest emperor penguins in the Oscar winning documentary, The March of the Penguins – the spectacle of  their “migration”  march to an ancient breeding place in the Antarctic to raise their young, the ritual of how they mate, exchange custody of the egg and the chick, and occasionally grieve over the death of their adorable chicks -- all of this drama played out in wretched freezing extreme sub-zero temperatures.

            Ravi Zacharias, in a sermon entitled, Pursuit of Meaning:  Regaining the Wonder, asked the question:  “How can we find life’s meaning?”  First, we need to regain that sense of wonder, he said.  We do so by understanding that Creation as documented in Genesis is the truth and by discounting the skeptics’ false notions that all of life happened by some incredible coincidence or chance of evolution. Thus we are led to gratitude and worship of the Creator.  Essential, too, is our need for loving and enduring relationships.  Finally, we need an enduring eternal relationship with our Lord to comprehend life’s meaning and to fully appropriate the great happiness He wants to give us.

 

   So I pray for wisdom to share the wonder of this message in new and refreshing ways with what one writer has called “a fragile net of words”. Ä