Consider this

On Saturday, my family went to the air show in Moose Jaw and it was great! To make things even better, most of my extended family and some other friends met us there too. All told, we had approximately 20 people in our entourage. What was not so great, though, was trying to move that big group without losing people along the way. We would start walking and someone would stop to look at an airplane. Then someone else would stop to get a souvenir. A little farther along, one of us would run into someone they knew and would stand there and talk for a while. There were just a lot of things distract us. Most of the time, distractions are not a big deal. However, a story from the life of Christ teaches that some distractions are much more serious. “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's fee...

“Lewis and Clark Caverns” is a huge limestone cave just outside of Bozeman, Montana. When we were there recently, a tour guide told us this story. When the cave was being developed for tourists, the government sent the “Civilian Conservation Corps” (CCC) to do the work. The CCC did not pay very well, so one young man came up with a plan to supplement his income. One Friday night, instead of leaving with his co-workers, this young man stayed in the cave. He planned to come out of his hiding place, collect some limestone, take it to town and sell it to the tourists. The only problem was that his candle, his only source of light, did not last as long as he had hoped. When it went out, he found himself in such darkness that he could not find his way out. In fact, he could not move at all. When his co-workers returned on Monday morning, they found the man still in the cave. Three days of being in total d...

A while ago, I saw a couple of deer heads mounted on a wall. That is not that notable in this part of the world, but this pair was unique, because their horns were intertwined. Two bucks had been fighting and headbutting one another when they got their horns so tangled up that they could not free themselves. In fact, they were so strongly caught that one of the deer eventually died and then, finally, a hunter shot the other one. The mount on the wall was done in such a way so that those two bucks are still stuck together. Now, think about this: Had those two not been fighting or trying to prove that they were the strongest, they may still be alive today. However, because they decided to try to beat each other down, both of them ended up dead. In Galatians 5:26 comes to mind here. It says, “Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying one another”. I am told that the word that is translated “provoki...