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Background to the nativity story. A Christmas meditation.

When traveling among the Alps in a dense mist, we have seemed to see vast lakes without a shore, crags that appeared like the battlements of heaven, and awful depths that thrilled us with horror. Yet much of that mystery was only caused by the mist. When we journeyed the same way on a bright morning,…

When a king is journeying through a foreign country, he does not wear his crown or the rest of his regalia; he often travels incognito. Even when he reaches his own country, he does not put on his royal robes for fools to admire at every village fair. He is not a puppet king, strutting upon the stage…

How many Christians are like the miser who never feels sure about the safety of his money, even though he has locked up the iron safe, and secured the room in which he keeps it, and locked up the house, and bolted and barred every door! In the dead of night, he thinks he hears a footstep, and tremblingly…

There is a river flowing along in a gentle slope toward the sea. A boatman is upon it. His vessel is here, then it is there, and soon it will be at the river’s mouth. Only that part of the river upon which he is sailing is present to him. But up yonder, on a lofty mountain, stands a traveler. As he looks…

When the Portuguese captain first went by the Cape of Storms it was a venturous voyage, and he called it the Cape of Good Hope when he had rounded it. When Columbus first went in search of the New World, his was a brave spirit that dared cross the unnavigated Atlantic. But there are tens of thousands…

When I was visiting one of our sick friends he uttered a sentence that stuck to me. He said, “I have had some education for heaven in attending the Metropolitan Tabernacle.” “How is that?” “Because I have been used to worship with a great company of godly people, used to join in the songs of great multitudes,…

I like the remark of the people who were requested to accept a Universalist as a minister. They said, “You have come to tell us that there is no hell. If your doctrine is true, we certainly do not need you; and if it is not true, we do not want you. Either way, we can do without you.” It is a most dreadful…

In some of the houses not far from here, I noticed some linnets in cages, in which there were tufts of grass or small branches of trees as perches for the poor prisoners; yet they were singing away right merrily. I suppose that grass and those fragments of trees were meant to remind them, in this great,…

A “richly supplied” entrance has sometimes been illustrated in this way. You see yonder ship. After a long voyage, it has neared the haven, but is much injured; the sails are rent to ribbons, and it is in such a forlorn condition that it cannot come up to the harbor: a steam-tug is pulling it in with…

At present, it is with us as it is with the world during the winter. If you had not seen the miracle wrought again and again, you would not guess, when you look upon those black beds in the garden, or when you walk over that snowy and frosty covering, crisp and hard beneath your feet, that the earth…

There were two brothers, one of whom had been diligently attentive to his worldly business, to the neglect of true religion. He succeeded in accumulating considerable wealth. The other brother was diligent in the service of the Master, and had learned both to distribute to the poor and for conscience’s…

Since rumors of a fountain of youth surfaced centuries ago, humans have been looking for a way to live forever. A new high-tech attempt is linking your brain to a computer, creating a digital replica, and uploading it to the computer. You enter a booth, scan and upload your mind to a server, then download…

# Philippians 3:17–21 ## Opening So far in this chapter Paul has warned against the Judaizers, and any who would place their confidence in who they are, or what they have done and not the finished work of Christ alone. By way of rebuking this idea, Paul gives his own longs list of “fleshly” qualifications…

Near the end of the film The Joy Luck Club, the protagonist, June, has a flashback to one of the last times she spoke to her mother before her mother’s death. In the flashback, June is upset that her mother just put her down in front of her childhood nemesis, Waverly. June deeply laments that her mother…

On December 26, 1919, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sent Babe Ruth, his best baseball player to the New York Yankees for only $25,000 because he needed the money to finance a musical. As a Yankee, Ruth set the record for home runs, and led his team to four World Series victories. The Red Sox, on the other…

Though the audience was limited due to pandemic restrictions, hundreds gathered at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt to hear the organ change chords on September 5, 2020. The organ in playing an experimental piece of music called Organ/ASLSP written by John Cage in the 1980s. The organ had been playing…

The makers of the board game Monopoly have created a new version of the game that promises to make the seemingly endless game even longer. The new board has an outer track and an inner track containing 96 spaces, compared to 40 on the original. There are 66 properties, 12 railroads and six utilities.…

When a person dies, their loved ones who are left behind want to find ways to remember them. In Cleveland, Ohio a Father-son duo, Michael and Kyle Sherwood have started a company to help. Their company, Save My Ink Forever, proposes to skin the tattoos off the corpses and turn them into framed artwork.…

NASA has plans for private citizens to spend up to 30 days in the International Space Station. It might be a little expensive for most of us, $35,000 per night. And that doesn’t include the trip to get there. That will add another $52 million dollars to the trip. That is quite the fee just to get out…

The Camp Fire reduced Paradise, CA to ashes. Jeff McClenahan, a 53-year-old college professor, returned to his home in Paradise and “found it destroyed, burned to the foundation.” As he stared in disbelief, he dropped to his knees and sobbed, “Its stuff. But it’s a lot of history. Everything, our whole…

Alan Sinclair does not want his death to be permanent. After he dies, his blood will be flushed from his body and replaced with antifreeze. Technicians will then cool the body with dry ice and fly it to a cryonics center in Michigan. The center will keep it at minus 320 degrees. When a solution is found…

While visiting the grave of a loved one, a woman in Brazil was given the shock of her life. She was laying flowers when a man started digging himself out of a neighboring grave. “The mourner heard some strange moaning and noticed the soil moving around in a neighboring plot.” The woman ran off and called…