CONGRATULATIONS, ABC News and all of their contributing consultants, for the most beautiful celebration of our 250th birthday as a nation ever done by a news organization! If you did not catch this spectacular and heart-warming pictorial of our nation and its true history, you really missed something very special. ABC and Disney beautifully captured the seven wonders of our nation: the Grand Canyon, the Appalachian Mountains, the Everglades, the Hawaiian Mauna Loa and Kilauea Volcanoes, the Niagara Falls, the…..
My father taught his congregations the love of God and how there is no greater sacrifice for a father to give than His Son to the world to die for our sins. This is the hymn, Faith of Our Fathers, paraphrased in honor of my father, Rev. Harold R. Stoudt. Because of his tremendous ability to make the most difficult passages of the Bible understandable to a small child, I am a Child of God, who has tried to follow…..
Many of us sit and wonder, while looking out our windows, when will we have answers to our problems? We can wait in two ways for our answers: passively or expectantly. The passive person sits around waiting for answers to come. They give up after a short time, and say, “No answers came. The problem is still here.” The expectant person believes that the answers will come soon. Every morning, they say, “They will come today.” God does not want…..
What is a mother? She cried and pushed you into this world, with Jesus Christ providing the light down the tunnel of life. She fed you and made sure you were warm with clothing and love. She set boundaries for you as you tested her time and again, but she hugged you throughout it all. By her role modeling, you became a strong Christian, and you realized that you “were because of many people,” the ubuntu. Before my mother passed…..
Our ability to learn is what gives our minds direction, but what keeps us on a divine path is our faith in God. When we sense His creation with awe and amazement, we grow to understand how large our world is and how God put so much beauty into it. Learning to survive in a world that is based on secularism and relativism can be challenging, but we must acknowledge that to find the keys to this world, we need…..
I lost a good friend this morning. She was a Christian mother and grandmother, who based her life on love, integrity, hard work, courage, generosity, and a love of life. In every aspect of her life, love showed through her words, actions, and deeds. I have never met a more dedicated grandmother to her granddaughters. She drove Emily and Maddy to their dance and music lessons every week and helped the girls to develop a strong Christian faith. She attended…..
You have lived, breathed, and walked in the Light, and the Light promised never to abandon you. Born in a lowly manger, the Light was Jesus Christ, who came to serve the world as His Father’s beloved Son. When you had doubts or fears, He wanted you to follow Him. In the silence, where did He lead you? He led me to the sea, where I saw Him calm the troubled waters and where He breathed the Holy Spirit into…..
We are given paths that only we can take. We may take some detours to get to our destinations, but we always arrive where we are supposed to be. How many miles we cover does not matter. What matters are the special moments along our paths that make us feel alive and loved. While on these paths, the light prevails over the dark. St. Ambrosius said, “Man does not find the truth; the truth finds man.” The truth is God,…..
What is a sense of community? It is the personal relationships you develop, your family, friends, and neighbors. It is the feeling that you belong, that you matter. It is to actually get involved in your surrounding area. In thinking about these three ideas of community, what have we lost, not only in ourselves, in our communities, and in our nation? I believe we have lost that sense of speaking to one another respectfully, with actual interest and compassion. When…..
In the recent release of the movie, The Last Supper, I loved how Peter described who he was before he met Christ and followed Him, and what he became after Christ passed. He was a fisherman by trade, who loved to walk along the shoreline and watch how the powerful waves tumbled and polished the stones as they moved through the water. Some loved the changes that happened to them; others needed more tumbling and polishing to remove the jagged…..