Consider this

             Sometimes we get the wrong idea and those ideas get passed on as “truth”.   It is not that we mean to do this.   It just happens because we are unaware that we are passing on misinformation.             For example, all of my life I have been taught about the New Testament hero, Paul, who single-handedly converted the entire known Gentile world.   The strange thing about that story: It is not true!             Even a cursory reading of the New Testament shows that Paul was not a “Lone Ranger”.   He always worked “in” and “with” a team!    For example, at the end of the letter to the Colossians, Paul greets and comments on no less than ten friends and co-workers.   Some of these names, such as “Luke” and “Mark”, are familiar to us while other names like are less well known, but no less important.               For example, Tychicus was Paul’s co-worker in many places and he is mentioned four times in the New Testament. Aristarchus was with Paul on many of his missi

            If you were to come over to my house right now and ask about our summer vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior, you would get to see two things:   Pictures and rocks.               Everywhere we went, we found rocks.   The beaches were rocky.   The hiking trails were rocky.   The rivers were full of rocks.   In fact, there were so many rocks that I hardly paid any attention to them. After a while, they all looked the same.             However, my wife and daughters kept picking them up and saying, "Oooh…look at this one".    To my surprise, rocks that looked very plain and ordinary on the ground were actually very interesting up close.   A grey, boring rock often had beautiful lines of colour in it.   Some of the rocks were broken and though the outside was plain, the inside was very cool.   You had to really look, but almost every rock had something interesting about it.   Several were so beautiful that they found their way back to our house and are

            Back when she was a little girl, Charlaine Dalpe could not have predicted the end result of her spontaneous act, but she is glad for the way it turned out.             In 2004, when she was 12 years old, Dalpe and friend Claudia Garneau tossed a plastic bottle, with a message inside, into the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to see if anyone would find it. The bottle was found, 8 years later, on the shores of a small village in Ireland.             A couple of weeks ago, nine year old Oisin Millea found the bottle and contacted Dalpe.   Somehow the story got the attention of Tourism Ireland and they offered the two women a free trip to Ireland to meet Oisin and to see the place where their bottle ended end up.               The interesting thing about this story is there that is no way those girls could have predicted or engineered this result.   Once they threw the bottle in the river, they gave up all control.   The events, as they unfolded, really had nothing to do w

          After building a magnificent temple in Jerusalem (see 2 Chronicles 2-5), King Solomon wonders, “Will God really dwell on earth with men?   The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you.   How much less this temple I have built” (2 Chronicles 6:18).                That is a great question!   It does seem sort of ludicrous to think any building, even a spectacular one like Solomon’s temple, would in any way be home to the God who formed the entire universe.   God must have rejected this notion right away, right?   Well, not so fast!                  “When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven… and the glory of the Lord filled the temple” (2 Chron. 7:1).             The question is, “Why?”    Why would God take up residence in that place?   Why did he need a temple?             The answer, I think, is found between Solomon’s question and God’s response.             Right after he asks the question, Solomon adds, “May your e