Day 59 - Kuwait

-
Today's message from the chaplain was from Luke 5:1-11 titled, "Growing Deeper in Your Faith". He noted four stages of growing deeper based on the text:

1. Growing in my faith begins with obedience. (vv.4,5)
2. My obedience unleashes God's blessings. (vv.6,7)
3. God's blessings inspire worship: It's a heart issue. (vv.8,9)
4. Once God has our heart, the Real Adventure begins. (vv.10,11)

After the service, I walked across to the gym for a good workout. These days, good is defined as exhaustion to the point of nausea. I showered and dressed, and went for Subway for lunch. I then returned to church for the Gospel service at the invitation of my students. I was blessed by the enthusiasm and participation of the attendees. In the evening one of my students hosted a get-together at her place for all of us in the class. We enjoyed a catered Soul Food dinner, followed by time around the swimming pool. Eventually I made it back to the hotel to get to bed. I've got a Grapevine conference call tomorrow morning at 4:00am.

It was so refreshing to be around people all day.

Popular posts from this blog

Smoot Marks

-
Image
In the fall of 1991, my involvement with the New Student Orientation program at my alma mater found our group attending a national conference in Boston. We arrived from Los Angeles two days early to take in some of the sights of autumn in New England. We strolled past a certain university campus in Cambridge just to be able to say, “Yeah, I went to Harvard.” And as we crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, I noticed that there were lines painted at regular intervals. Further investigation revealed these to be Smoot marks. What is a Smoot mark? In the spirit of a last-minute term paper, let me borrow liberally from Wikipedia: The smoot is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure ...
Read more

Light a Candle

-
"It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness." -Chinese proverb This morning I came across a CNN page that showed "Before and after" satellite photos of several locations across Gaza ( Link here ). It broke my heart - again. When Hamas crossed the border, murdering and kidnapping people, it broke my heart - again.  For years, our hearts have been broken by the cycles of violence, not only in the Middle East, but everywhere around us. And the worst part is the shouting we engage in if, for no other reason, a desperate search for catharsis. It is as if we turn to blaming or vilifying one group or another as a way to ease our sense of helplessness. Let me suggest an alternative. But first a story: Growing up in a home where I learned my Jordanian father was actually born in Palestine (Yes, that's what it was called in 1938), I learned about the history of the region from someone who lived through it. Over the years, I supplemented that knowledge with fur...
Read more