So apparently someone once asked Andrew Carnegie how much wealth he thought was enough. His response was, “Just a little bit more.”
On the other hand, I once read about a woman down south, living in a tiny house with a dirt floor, trying to eke out a living on a meager piece of land. She received some money from the Farm Aid benefit, and somebody asked her what she was going to do with it.
Fred Craddock told some of the best stories. There’s even a book of them compiled by a couple of his students and colleagues.
I don’t know that this one is in that book; I first heard it in a recording someone made of a lecture of his, maybe at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon. He said he was guest preaching at a church somewhere in Oklahoma one Sunday. It was his custom to teach an adult Sunday school class when he was preaching somewhere like that, so he asked if he could do that there.
I know I don’t have to stand up here and tell you that you should pray. It goes without saying that if you’re a Christian, you pray. It’s just part of what it means to be a Christian. I also don’t want anybody thinking there’s only one right way to pray.
I learned something a couple weeks back.
We’ve all seen, in Western movies and TV programs, tumbleweeds blowing around. A lot of the time they symbolize something: desolation, emptiness, perhaps a lead character’s aimlessness.
Pastor Joe McTaggart answered the knock on his study door with a weary sigh.
Things had gotten so bad in his church, the First Christian Church of Corbin City, Kansas, that or the first time in his life he was seriously thinking about leaving the ministry, retiring, moving to a quiet lake somewhere to finish out his days fishing and writing. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the people there—he’d spent the last decade living and working among them, sharing their joys and sorrows, watching their children grow up, helping them raise up new leaders.
I was in my first or second year of college when ,just before Easter, I became aware that there are New Testament scholars who believe Jesus was not actually raised from the dead. I didn’t know any of the details, and didn’t know the names of any of those scholars, but I’d heard this little snippet of information as I went about my everyday business.
This might be a very appropriate confession to make on Cinco de Mayo, when we’re about to go downstairs for a fellowship dinner celebrating the occasion: I love tacos. Absolutely love them. Carne asada, carnitas, al pastor, tinga, birria, you name it, I love them. I love the ground beef ones like you get at Taco Bell, too. Apart from any that might be made from tongue or some kind of guts, I love tacos.
It seems like just about every church has a personality. In some churches everyone dresses very formally, and in others people are quite casual—even to the point, now and then, of elders getting up to pray at the communion table in shorts. In some churches all ideas are supposed to come from the pastor, and in others most of the best ones come from members of the congregation.
Most kids go through various phases as they grow up. Some of these have to do with food: they will only eat, for instance, macaroni and cheese, every meal, every day, for weeks on end. Or maybe they’re about clothing: when my nephew was really little, he wanted to wear a Power Rangers costume every day. Eventually he outgrew the costume, and my sister thought that would be the end of it; but a friend of hers had the same costume in a bigger size.
When Mike and I lived in Oregon, even though we had a car, we liked to get up sometimes of a Saturday morning and go on a bus adventure. Mike generally rode the bus to work in those days, so he bought a monthly pass that allowed him to ride any bus or train to anywhere in the Portland metro area. At the time it cost him under $50 each month—substantially less than the upkeep of another vehicle. And I would buy a day pass that allowed me to do the same thing, just for the day.
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