A MEASURE OF LIFE

Death is often a measure of life.  In degrees it teaches about friendship, family and about love.  What it can also do is point out not how much is taken away but how much is left behind. 

-- Unknown


#3159

SYMBOLIZING FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE

(NOTE: While visiting our Sister Church in Lithuania with our mission team in 2008, we had the opportunity to stop at the Hill of Crosses. -- Dave Wilkinson)

SYMBOLIZING FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE

The people of Lithuania take cross bearing a little more seriously than we do. For them the cross symbolizes faith, hope and love. There are crosses everywhere in the countryside, on roads, in city parks and village squares. Communities and individuals erect crosses to bring them health and to commemorate events like weddings, births and christenings. Crosses are also erected to commemorate historical events. One of these is the Baltic Way, in which millions of people linked hands stretching across the Baltics from Estonia to Lithuania on August 25, 1989. About 9 monuments commemorate this extraordinary event.

The nation's pride is the Hill of Crosses, located north of Siauliai. Lithuanians erected crosses there as early as the mid-19th century. The Soviet government couldn't tolerate that kind of spiritual expression, so they totally destroyed the hill in 1961, then again in 1973 and 1975. But people kept erecting more crosses, until in 1980 their destruction stopped. Today the crosses number in the many thousands. They are different sizes and shapes, some simple, some ornate, but they immortalize Lithuania's troubles, misfortunes, joys, hope and faith.

For them, the cross is more than a symbol in the church. It is symbol for the world to see. A symbol that will not go away. It is a symbol of sacrifice. A sacrifice that gives each and every one of us hope and faith and courage. 

-- Billy D. Strayhorn in At Cross Purposes


#3158

TAKING PART IN GOD'S CREATION

There are great limits upon the human imagination.  We can only rearrange the elements God has provided. No one can create a new primary color, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or a completely original animal.  Even by writing a book, planting a garden, or begetting a child, we never create anything in the strict sense; we only take part in God's creation. 

-- C. S. Lewis in Mere Christian


#3157

SO GOD MADE A FARMER

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.

"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon -- and mean it." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.

"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.

-- Paul Harvey


#3156

SUPER (BOWL) QUOTES

Concluding our run up to the Super Bowl, here are a few quotes from some past Super Bowl Champions here in Green Bay.

Packers QB Aaron Rodgers: "I’m just trying to follow Jesus’ example . . . one of my favorite quotes is by St. Francis of Assisi, who said: 'Preach the gospel at all times. And when necessary, use words.'”

Packers WR Donald Driver: "You’ve got to make Him first . . . when you wake up in the morning you’ve got to give Him first the glory and then you move on with your day."

Packers Defensive Coordinator Dom Capers: “I’ve always said coaches get too much of the credit and often too much of the blame. You’re never as good or as bad as people say, but you’ve got to have faith in God to be able to handle the ups and the downs because usually there are going to be more downs.”


#3155