CoffeeBreak With The Word

For our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather, we look forward to what we have not yet seen.For the troubles we see will soon be…

… and it’s all small stuff! Richard Carlson wrote a book using that title. I have not read it, but I think I should. Did you ever notice how quickly trivial matters take over in life, how much time we spend on issues of little or no consequence? The range of issues that I will…

I woke up today feeling incredibly wealthy. No, I didn’t win Mega-Millions. (That would be fun, wouldn’t it?) My retirement account has not grown very much, if at all, in this last quarter. My bank account is balanced, but certainly not bulging with excess! So why am I claiming this great wealth? I was reviewing…

Ben Franklin’s maxim about the inevitability of death and taxes could well be re-written to include a third inevitable experience in life: Conflict! It’s everywhere – politics, religion, church, school, local pub, homes, among friends. Surely there is a time for conflict and, perhaps, even for war. There is a time when defense of the…

According Doug Pollock (Outreach, August, 2005 issue) as American forces moved through the city of Najah in April, 2003, rumors spread that the soldiers were going to desecrate a mosque. An angry crowd of Iraqi civilians gathered and bloodshed seemed imminent until the officer, Lt. Col. Christopher Hughes, barked terse commands to his soldiers. “Kneel,…

In her column, Connie Schultz reports, “St. John’s Reformed United Church of Christ is a 225-year-old church in rural Middlebrook, Va. On Wednesday, the outgoing message on the church phone still invited you to buy tickets for May’s spaghetti supper, but that has to be the last thing on the minds of its grieving congregation.…

One of my favorite Scripture stories is that of Daniel – whose Hebrew name means “God is my Judge.” Most likely from a family of prominence in Judah, he was swept up in the first Assyrian invasion and taken to become a slave in the Babylonian empire. Despite these miserable circumstances, terrible disadvantages, and having…

Robert Burns, the 18th century Scottish poet, wrote of the poor mouse whose nest was torn up by the farmer’s plow. “The best laid schemes o’ mice and menGang aft a-gley, (go oft awry)And leaves us naught but grief and painFor promised joy.”We think life is planned, that everything is going in the direction we…

It doesn’t get much more dead than Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones! Familiar with it? In the 37th chapter of his book, the prophet tells of being set in the middle of a valley that was full of bones, bleached and dried by the sun. The flesh that clothed the bones is…