"[T]here was more than merely hope that lay in an animal trough in a small town called Bethlehem that night the angels appeared to startled shepherds and announced the birth of a Savior, their Messiah and Lord. Something capable of instilling a fear deeper and wider than hell itself lay swaddled on top of the straw too."
"We should just ignore people like that and let them yell at the wall for all we care," Laura told me. I hardly saw that as the time for being level-headed. Visions of landing a solid right hook across the guy's nose played in my mind's eye.
"If you were to let the tidal wave of divine love knock you over where you stand, releasing in the rushing water all your sin and regret and guilt and shame, assured that God sees all that is in you yet rejoices that his Son Jesus willingly stretched out his arms and bled and died in your place to make a way for you to come back home, then you'd finally be in the one and only position in which loving others in that same way is possible."
"And so the fool impelled his burly brawn / Toward wrangling in the sun." You can see where this is going.
We're all looking for something. We found it in a mud-brick house in the slums of a Central Asian capital.
A word that flies high over these past four years of my sojourn here in Central Asia is the word loneliness. It's a monster I was not at all prepared to face. The monster came anyway. Turns out he's a hard one to chase away. Every last human being senses a deep-seated need that is … Continue reading They Make Me Rich