Common Saint

I don't have many memories from childhood, so those that I have are very important to me. While I was driving in this morning, I drifted in my thoughts back to a moment when I was a very young boy living in Cambridge , Indiana . In my memory I was a lying in grass, very thick green grass, on my back and looking straight up at the sky. I remember that it was sunny, but not so bright that it hurt my eyes or caused me to squint. The breeze was blowing and the air was clean and fresh. The big blue sky was dotted with puffs of white, cottony clouds. I was watching the billows toddling across the sky, slowly changing shape in time with the currents of wind blowing across my body and tussling the patches of the long blades of grass around me. I remember trying to discern the shapes of the clouds and recognize in them some figure that was familiar to me. It was a Robert Browning moment where, "God's in his heaven...All's right with the world!" Only I was little, very li...

So we are on our way to the church this morning and Emily, my oldest, says, "Man, the year has flown by" which got us all talking about the fact that we are already in November and that Christmas is just around the corner. How did that happen? Christmas nearly here!!! Well, I told Emily that it seems every year that you grow, the years just seem to clip off that much quicker. I added in my statement that because Christ is the Lord and center of our lives that we will live even after are days are spent here on earth. So that got me to thinking about God's purpose for our existence here and I realized something that I never really thought about before. I know it is silly but the thought really impacted me....In heaven there will be no evangelism! When death comes or God rolls this world up like a scroll (whichever comes first), all opportunities are gone forever. So many times we focus on someone else slipping into eternity without hearing, but I realized this morning durin...