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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Slaking one's thirst


13Jesus answered, "Those who drink this water will get thirsty again, 14but those who drink the water that I will give them will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring which will provide them with life-giving water and give them eternal life." (John 4)


In this case it's important to know what the symbol for water is. It will be a spring within us so that we would never be thirsty. Understanding Jesus makes us never feel that something is missing. Understanding Jesus gives us a handle to live here temporarily. Christians are satiated people who confidently move through the timeline to something after the timeline ends. Satiation here and life after here are what the drinkers of Jesus' water get from him. It's the complete package - nothing is missing.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Magnanimosity


I received an email two days ago about something Eisenhower did. The email was in direct response to what the president of Iran had said about the Holocaust never happening. Someone had carefully put together a series of pictures of Jewish death camps under Hitler. The power point slides one after the other showed the horror of all the gased or dead bodies in the different camps across Germany. The slide show began with Eisenhower authorizing all those pictures to be taken because he feared that someone in the future would say that the Holocaust never happened. He wanted to leave to posterity the visual proof that a horror of that magnitude did exist.

I remember 2000 years ago the Son of God coming to the grave of a man who had been dead 4 days. The whole point of the episode was in the Son's prayer saying that he knew that the people needed to see the dead rise so that they could believe that he was the Son of God. Although the story takes up only a little space, a visual was left for succeeding generations. If that happened in modern times one would think that something of that magnitude would have received an immense amount of attention and lasted for generations to come. But if a person can say some magic words to erase the Holocaust, then I don't know.

Even in our own short lives, we tend to forget some pretty important details of how we were helped from time to time in our lives. If we need to look around our lives for an example of some supernatural intervention, and we can't seem to latch on to that visual, actually that experienced event, then I don't know.

If you ask someone over 40 to identify some of those times in their lives when something of great magnitude happened, and you get the response that they can't really think of anything, then I don't know.

Life is a bit slippery sometimes. But, to forget the details that gut an experience of its magnitude is a terrible capacity to have. That capacity can relegate anything to oblivion. Heaven forbid!

Life after 50 is called the "Golden Years" because the ability to learn from life's visuals and actual experiences replaces repeating the same mistakes. Replacing the crusty mud of bad judgment with the gold of learning to do better is a 50-year experience and more. That's why I know there was a holocaust and believe that a dead man did come to life once because the Son of God said, "Come forth!" Those are events of magnitude. The Golden Years teach us to believe rather than dismiss things of magnitude.