In Part 1, Our Father’s Loving Design, we saw three vital truths to understanding the world around us: God is good always, all that is in the heavens and the earth reflect His design, and all good things today are through Jesus Christ.
Author: Gene Slavit
I remember spending hour upon hour of my youth looking at spiders and their webs, following columns of ants, catching snakes (sometimes poisonous!), watching birds flit from tree to tree, seeing giant clouds race across the vast Missouri sky, grabbing crawdads from behind in Buck Creek, finding baby bunnies in the blackberry patch, seeing our kitty give birth and nurse her kittens, catching frogs at the pond and making torches from the cattails there, lying at the foot of my bed to watch lightning and then listening for the thunder, sitting transfixed beneath a winter sky full of brilliant stars beyond counting, and catching bumblebees in pink, pollen-filled clover.
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Was Jesus in the Beginning?
As a boy, I loved to listen to my parent’s old radio/phonograph player. It was set in a beautiful wooden cabinet, and I was often fascinated by the glowing tubes that warmed up to receive radio signals or the stack of records that dropped one at a time so the arm could gently place the needle on that record.
One of my favorite songs of the day was called “I’m My Own Grandpa.” It was a humorous ballad about a man who, through a variety of marriages and family relations, became his own grandfather.
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The Name of Our Lord Jesus
Whenever my brothers and sisters needed to settle an argument, we would say “Dad said so,” or “Mom said so.” Their authority was good enough to see things happen. Perhaps you’ve seen the same at work. If your supervisor gave permission, then you could freely go where you needed to and get the job done. How about your personal checks? Are they any good without the authority of your signature? The name is the key.
Sherry and I love to read five psalms each night before going to bed. If you read five per day, you get through all 150 psalms in thirty days. Then you can start over again the next month. Psalm 34 is one that we read today. As we saw its depth and beauty, we wanted to share it with others.
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Next Thought
Sickness fully overtook him,
Lazarus was in the grave,
Messengers sent to the master,
oh my brother can you save?
After four days he hath rotted,
stinking at the doors of death,
Now could even the Messiah,
bring back mortal life and breath?
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All for One and One for All
I’ve enjoyed being unified in my relationships with others throughout my life. I was unified into a wonderful family with a great Dad and Mom and all eight of us kids. I was unified with my Boy Scout troop, my school class, and my soccer team. Later I was unified with my wife Sherry and our son Elijah. These are all relationships that endeavor to live the old motto “all for one and one for all.”
In elementary school, we had some classic “come back” lines in certain situations. If someone said they “loved” something, we would respond: “Then why don’t you marry it!” Another comeback when someone made a remark about us was, “Prove it!”
As the manager of “Wooly World” at the Toorak Hotel shopping plaza in Melbourne, Australia, I met a lot of men and women looking for high-end sheepskin garments. The most shocking experience of my sales life happened there in 1982.
Have you ever seen a newborn puppy or kitten, though blind, find their mother and begin to nurse? God built these “basics” (like feeding ourselves) into life. The basics are simple and easy to find and understand. When things get complicated, they can lose their value. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said, “Give thanks to God who made necessary things simple, and complicated things unnecessary.”