Whispers of Truth

Last week my daughter purchased some purple dye to stain her white tennis shoes. I have to say that I really couldn’t envision the process or even her desire to dye the shoes. They were just a really cheap pair of white, now-stained, Wal-Mart shoes. She began the process by bleaching the shoes (to remove any stains that might block the dye) and then came the interesting part. I had assumed she would just drop the shoes in the dye and have completely purple shoes, but that wasn’t the case. She carefully wiped Vaseline on the trim of the shoes. When asked why, her response went something like this: “You wipe the Vaseline on to keep the dye off the parts you want to remain white.”  I have to say that the Vaseline worked perfectly to keep the trim white even though the results of the dye job weren’t to her liking the first time around—light pink just wasn’t the look she was going for. She decided to try again in an attempt to create the purple she desired and went th...

I don’t know about you, but I have the tendency to make many things in my life more complicated than they have to be. Some would say it is because I’m a woman, and I would reply, “Yes, but I am a daughter of Eve.” In fact, all of humanity bears the burden of sin that Adam and Eve chose to take upon themselves in the garden. The one solution for our inherited sin condition is accepting the redemption Christ earned for us on the cross. Complicating the simple has always been a struggle for mankind. I think of Abraham telling Sarah to lie (twice) and say that she was his sister (Gen. 12 and Gen. 20). I think of Abraham’s struggle because he didn’t simply believe in God’s provision of a son through Sarah. I think of Rebekah’s deception of her husband through Jacob because she felt God needed help with his promise (Gen. 27)... and the list could go on and on throughout the Old Testament of people who made life far more complicated than it had to be. Even the Apostle Pau...

More than likely, most of you have quickly tired of my English teacher analogies, but I have yet another one for you. This week I am at an AP conference at The University of Alabama learning what I need to know to be successful at teaching AP Literature and Composition to seniors at my high school. Most of the teachers in the room (even veteran AP teachers) are anxiously awaiting test scores from the 2013 test administered in May. The thought occurred to me that today there is still hope for good results--not that there is anything I can do at this point to alter the results--I simply wait for them to be revealed. Tomorrow, I may be crushed by my failure to convey important concepts and skills to my students, but today there is still hope. Tomorrow, all my efforts to distill knowledge will be measured on one page with a few names and numbers. Spiritually speaking, I thought of how many of us are now resting in what we've already done or accomplished and hoping that things will turn...

This past week while traveling for work, I had the opportunity to listen to a local Christian radio station in Birmingham. I heard a woman, who had recently lost her son when he committed suicide, call in to offer encouragement to others going through difficult situations. She offered this bit of encouragement to others asking why bad things happen in life: “What God could have prevented in His power, He allows in His wisdom.” So many times, we question God’s goodness or power, yet He is supreme in His wisdom. He alone is the creator God of the universe, and we are merely His creation. When Job questions God and asks what he has done to Him and what is his sin, God is quiet. We forget that He is under no obligations to answer His creation. In chapter 40, instead of answering all of Job’s questions, God turn the questions back to Job: “Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me” (Chronological Study Bible, vs. 6).  It is easy to ...