Update:
I felt like being adventurous and getting out of the house on New
Year’s Day. Karen and I went to the
movies. Everything went smoothly;
although we would have preferred if the handicapped seating area was further
from the screen. We are usually back row
kind of people in the theater. If that
is the worst thing I can think of; it went really well. My son, Jon, joined us and commented on how
weird it was to see me out and about. It
was a nice change of pace to get out of the house and do something “normal.”
Other than that, it was a pretty quiet day. We could have slept in on January 1st—I
made it until 5 a.m. then couldn’t go back to sleep; my wife was able to sleep
until 7:30 a.m. Good for her! She did a few errands in the morning while I
took a nap in preparation for going out. Then I got ready to go (exercises and dressed)
and out the door at noon. After the movie, it was time to go home and hunker
down again. I went to bed fairly
early.
I noticed on the ride home how the bumps and jolts of roadways in
Wisconsin during the winter didn’t hurt my stump like they did a few weeks
earlier. I think that is a sign of my
leg continuing to heal. Either that or
the DOT has been out repairing the roads and filling in the potholes…we all
know that isn’t happening!!! So it must be I am healing and getting
stronger.
Thought for the Day:
C.S.
Lewis wrote in ‘The Problem of Pain’, “God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse
a deaf world.”
It
seems most people have selective hearing.
We only hear what we want to hear.
We believe what corresponds to what we want to hear. Just think about any crime drama. The prosecutor or the police have a suspect
whom they believe did the crime. They see
all of the evidence that supports their belief and they ignore or downplay the
evidence that seems to point in a different direction. It is really hard to be truly unbiased in
things that we care about.
Here
is another example, politics. Whichever
political party that you tend to side with—the other party is not only wrong,
but pig-headed, untruthful, and has a hidden agenda. If the opposing party’s candidate is in
office, he can do nothing right. While
if your candidate is in office, you don’t often see that he has major
flaws. Anything that he does that you
disagree with is minimized or explained away.
I think in reality either candidate is a mixed bag of the good, the bad,
and the ugly. I personally tend to vote
and agree with one party over the other; but I refuse to buy into the
conspiracy theory that the other party is wicked, evil, and is always pushing a
hidden agenda (and “my” party is not). Now that I’ve mixed politics and religion,
what other toes can I step on?
James 1:23-24 “Those
who listen to the word but do not do what it says are like people who look at
their faces in a mirror and, after looking at themselves, go away and
immediately forget what they look like.”
Have you ever been shocked by looking at a picture of yourself and think to
yourself, “That’s not what I look like!
What a horrible picture!” You
aren’t seeing the facts; your mind is projecting a mental image of what you
think you look like. The bible passage
talks about a person who looks at himself in the mirror, notices things, but
before he takes care of it, he forgets and goes on with his day. A few years ago when I still had hair on the
top of my head, I noticed as I shaved that I had a TERRIBLE case of “bed head.” I don’t remember what happened, but I left
the bathroom and never fixed my hair. It
wasn’t until I got home that night that I saw myself in a mirror and realized
what I looked like at the office and while doing errands all day. YIKES!
When we read the bible, it shows us all kinds of flaws and blemishes that
we aren’t aware that we have. God’s
purpose in showing us is so we can take care of them. But normally we ignore them. We may not read and ponder the bible, so we aren’t
looking in the mirror. We may only look
at other people in the mirror, so we see their flaws but not our own. God wants us to take a good look at ourselves
so that we can come to Him and ask His forgiveness.
Most people think of themselves as pretty good people. Compared to many, I am pretty good. But am I really that good? My friend, Randy Larson, shared this
illustration with me on Sunday. If
someone thinks that God will accept them as they are because, in their eyes, they
are pretty good; ask them, “On a daily
basis, since you are good, would you say you only sin (fail God’s moral law)
three times a day? Take a sheet of paper
and mark three dots on it. This sheet of
paper represents the person who is looking good so far. But three sins a day adds up to 1,095 sins a
year. Start making lots of dark spots on the paper! Most people live to 70
years old, so that would add up to 76,650 in a life time. Scribble the whole thing black. So you think that God will accept you because
you are “a pretty good person.” Can you
think of any judge who is not going to declare you are guilty if you come into
court with 76,650 crimes that you’ve committed?
The purpose of this spiritual mirror is two-fold. The first is for you to see yourself as you
really are and begin to make changes for the better in your life. The second purpose is for you to see that no
matter how hard you try, you’ll never completely clean up your life, so you
need forgiveness and cleansing that only comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
So every day, look into that spiritual mirror and then do something about
it.
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