A Long Obedience In The Same Direction

I'm extremely blessed to live across the street from waterfront properties in my neighborhood.  I'm doubly blessed to have wonderful neighbors who have told my wife and I to come over any time and sit on their adirondack chairs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  I took them up on that offer last night and was treated to the kaleidoscope of changing colors in the sky including this picture. After sitting in solitude for a few minutes, my neighbor came out with a couple glasses of wine and we enjoyed the beauty in front of us together. He asked me, "What does this bring to mind of God for you?"  Interestingly I had been thinking about that already.  For as I sat and watched the sunset I thought back 24 hours to a comment a friend had made to me.  She said how amazed she is that God paints the sunset for us every night.  I understood how she felt, but my internal thought was, "That's a beautiful sentiment, but I have to disagree." Does God act...

For decades I've been reading the four accounts of Jesus' life and teaching - the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  From a young age I've enjoyed reading "red letter" editions of the Bible which use red fonts for the words spoken by Jesus. This has the effect of lifting those words up a little higher off the page.  These red letters communicate to the reader, "Pay attention to these words more than the rest." But are those the words that Jesus really said? Here are some thoughts about that issue. First, Jesus spoke in Aramaic.  The gospels were written in Greek.  They are translated from the Greek manuscripts into English.  Anyone who has ever worked translating from one language to another knows there is NEVER 100% word for word accuracy because different languages work differently than each other.  Translators have to come up with different sentences to convey the meaning of the original speaker. Second, the gospels were not writte...