Pastor’s Weekly Letter

I read an article recently in a religious newspaper. It told of a famous Japanese artist who had contacted Christian missionaries to inquire about a ticket to heaven. He was a very old man who knew that death could not be far away. He had heard that Jesus had tickets to heaven, and he wanted to purchase one. Some of us would laugh at the old man for wanting to purchase a ticket to heaven. But none of us would laugh at him for wanting to go to heaven. We all want to do that, and we can understand that […]

Edna St. Vincent Mellay spoke for all of the human race when she wrote a poem entitled “Surge without Music.” It is a protest again death, not her own, but the death of others, many of whom she had known and loved. Death is always a disturbing consideration. It is like a mysterious curtain through which every person must pass, and no one knows for sure what waits on the other side. This element of mystery means that death is also frightening. The life that we are now living in these physical bodies is the only life that we have […]

As we read the news reports these days, one of the most obvious facts about our modern world is fragmentation, separation, people divided into separate, warring and competing groups. This tragic condition prevails at almost every level of life. One can observe it on our national scale these days. And we can observe it on the international scale as well. How many borders are there in this world that are watched on both sides by guards carrying guns? A carefully watched border can mean only one thing: the nations on either side are divided. Seems that people do not trust […]

So what do you think God’s intentions for families might be? What part does God mean families to play in human life? Only when we understand what God has revealed about the family can we hope to find solutions to the problems families face today. The clearest statement of God’s plan for the family is the one that comes right at the beginning of the Bible in the account of the creation of the human person. We often miss the point of this wonderful account. Living as we do in a highly individualistic society, we’re used to thinking of humanity […]

In 1806, William Wordsworth looked at his own life and the lives of his contemporaries and wrote these lines of poetry: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” If that was an accurate description of life in the early part of the nineteenth century, how much more does it describe our lives in the early part of the twenty-first century? Don’t you agree that it can truthfully be said of you and me, “the world is too much with us?” Day in and day out, most of us are […]