The Bible Story Family

It’s midnight!   Your first day in heaven has just begun.   Midnight, but the sky is as blue as two-o’clock on a July Nebraska day.   No sun is visible, and yet everything is bright about you.   It’s midnight, but there’s no night there, for the Lamb is the light thereof.             It’s midnight, your first day in heaven.   You haven’t slept a wink since leaving earth but there’s no jet lag, not even a latent yawn.   Of course there are many sights and sounds to capture your attention, but it’s more than that.   In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you have become like Christ for you have seen Him as He is.   And part of being like Christ means you will never again be tired, never again grow weary for lack of sleep because He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.             It’s midnight, your first day in hea...

After more than forty years of pre-marital counseling I have come to believe that Ephesians 5:21 could well be the most over-looked verse in the entire Bible. Translations which include helpful headings often divide it from the section on wives and husbands.  Others, which indicate paragraph divisions that were not in the original manuscripts, do the same by starting a new paragraph at verse 22.      Instead of overlooking verse 21 we need to make it the foundation for a walk-on-the- water dare.  DARE to enter into a husband-wife relationship scripturally based on mutual submission.      To some the word submit conjures up images of burly men in wife-beater t-shirts, black-robed Puritans burning innocent women at the stake, or hairy cavemen dragging girls through the dirt by their hair.  A woman being asked to submit to a man in the liberated culture of the twenty-first century ranks near the top of the “idiocy from which we have be...

“You can’t be creative like God,” people have told me since I started this Creativity Blog two years ago.   “He created out of nothing.   Everything man creates comes from the elements and materials He originally placed into the universe.” They are right.   We cannot create something out of nothing.   But I would suggest that everything we do create is patterned after those original God-created structures.   He provides the model for all that mankind seeks to produce.   The fact that we never quite measure up to His creativity does not provide an excuse for not trying.   We should model our creative endeavors after God. Human reasoning might argue that we do measure up and even exceed the creativity of God.   He didn’t invent television or jet airplanes or the internet or pace-makers.   “Surely the progress of man no longer depends on His original creation” they would contend. Human ingenuity and technological expertise have c...

Football season has tackled our attention.  Across the country underdogs prepare to face self-proclaimed, or at least sports-prognosticator proclaimed, champions.  In the locker room of every school fielding an underdog team you can hear echoes of a coach declaring, “We can beat them.  You just have to want it more than they do.” Talent or passion?  The question ranks right up alongside nature or nurture. Forecasters on the sports pages inevitably choose talent.  Yet week after week the underdogs manage to produce those upsets which cause us to root for their success. What I know about football would fit inside a deflated pigskin.  But when it comes to creativity, I choose to sit on the side of desire every time.  Those with great ability have a great playbook, but it tends to concentrate on the tried-and-true.  Their emphasis, even in creative endeavors, favors the “what-is!” Those motivated by desire provide the passion displayed by the football...

I HEAR YOU BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! A post from “Life of Fred Math” which claimed to be a limerick totally flummoxed me until provided with a translation.   I needed a math interpreter to help me understand.             A dozen, a gross, and a score             Plus three times the square root of four             Divided by seven             Plus five times eleven             Is nine squared and not a bit more. The need for interpretation has long been accepted as a given for cross-cultural communication.   Unless you can speak to someone in their language, understanding proves extremely limited, consisting of smiles, gestures and facial expression.   Missionaries often spend the f...