Visiting Granny

Generation to generation our values are shaped. And the great-grandparents and the great-grandchildren must actually see one another for those values to be indelibly stamped on our hearts and minds and spirits. So we take the granddaughters over to see "Granny" as much as possible.

Dorothy Wright had mutual love and respect and fun with her husband. After she was alone, she traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, each year for 6 months to teach English reading and conversation to preachers, young people and street kids. She had such fun doing this valuable ministry. And one of the neatest things is that Darlene and her Mom did ministry together, sharing the joys and pains of the lives and needs of street kids.

Now she sits quiet, no wrinkles on her face, sleeping most of the time, not speaking and seldom opening her eyes, and she will be 90 years old soon. But she still makes noises in her throat when a great-granddaughter says "I love you, Granny."

She also has a malignancy growing on her face. So Darlene sat with her for the whole process of surgery for it. Not to remove it completely, but to limit its growth and remove the sight of it. She slept through the surgery and it is healing great.

Generation to generation we love one another, and we keep the values alive - love and fun in life and service in Christ's name and devotion to one another. Blessed be the Lord who gives us this life, and even better is coming.

Creation and Necessity

I am so amazed at all the marvelous discoveries about the universe and all the thought that goes into where all this came from and what we can know from looking at the universe. Recently astronomers have found two planets circling a star. And there is a star out there that has an enormous amount of water around it. And scientists are thinking about it carefully. Already they say the water can't come from passing asteriods and comets and other celestial sources. The water is too close in to the star -- so the star itself is producing the water. But from what astronomers already know, the star should be producing carbon monoxide. Yet water is forming. It's exciting to think about what that might mean and what new discoveries will come because the formation of huge amounts of water is possible in a star.

Stephen Hawking is one of those thinkers who seeks to understand the universe and history and form theories about the source and the destiny of life. He thinks about gravitation and relativity and all those obscure things most of us know so little about. And Hawking has recently written that what we know about science does not bring about a necessity that God is involved in creation! He concludes that the more we know about the universe, the less necessary it is that we must argue from the creation to the Creator.

What a marvelous idea! What freedom to our faith! And it fits the theology of Scripture. We do not believe in God because the universe demands it. We do not believe in God because of some evidence built into the structure of the universe or the atom or gravity. We do not believe in God because reasoning about the nature of life leads us to that conclusion.

We believe in God because he has come to us, because he has made himself known to us, because Jesus Christ has described the Father who made all things. As John wrote, "what we have seen, what we have touched.." The mystery of our faith is this, that Christ lives in us. At the core of our faith is not knowledge about the physical universe, but knowledge about God himself.

Once you know God in Christ, then you can see where the farthest star and the most amazing phenomena fit into his reality. As Paul writes in Romans 1, the glory and majesty is seen in all the things that are. We might even want to talk about intelligent design. But we do not start there. We do not argue from design to the designer. We know him, for he knows us, and he came to set our hearts on fire.

Christ is in us. And this truth sets us free.